Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.