Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for exampl….

I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it i….

I thought, "Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood." Those were….

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer..

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; n….

I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else..

There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a litt….

I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't….

It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket..

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the le….

The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be s….

Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die o….

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out ….

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept th….

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise..

I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young..

Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style for communicating what the sensation of….

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life..

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent.

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count..

To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and….