This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

It is important not to trust people too much.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.