In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

I do my best work under pressure, so I’ll nick an artery, and my husband isn’t allowed to stanch the bleeding till I’ve banged out a chapter.

Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

150 years ago in [Charles] Dickens's time there was at least a sense of craft. So some of the things people had inside of them, they had the possibility of expressing in the making of things - even in a daily way with their clothes or their food. People made a good deal of both themselves. Now our daily lives are almost all consumption. Craft plays a tiny role.