All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

A secret is powerful when it is empty.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.