Occupation: Author Birth: February 3, 1947
I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels..
Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world..
Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty..
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear..
Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!.
No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other materi….
The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence..
I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now,….
I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing..
It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing part….
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are t….
Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The la….
Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I h….
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever….
When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any mo….
Most of the boys would come with bits of equipment that their fathers had given them from their war days - helmets, canteens, binoculars, these kinds….
We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible..
Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life….
As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out.
Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the ….
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything..