Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.

Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.