All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure..

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in wr….

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to….

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from..

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell..

(From the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime) He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many ti….

I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many….

Swimming always cleans your soul.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent..

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before..

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on..

The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons..

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely..

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past..

Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid?an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but ….

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who r….

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover al….

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if….

What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in ….

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little..