...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there's nothing left.

I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.

It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.