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

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

If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?

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

We are bound by the secrets we share.

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.

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.