I used to spend all of my time projecting. I was never in the moment. It was always tomorrow or next week or two months from now. That was one of the reasons I always had this sense of anxiety.

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.

would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.