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.

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.

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 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.

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

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

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