Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
You don’t want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven’t done what I do. Most book reviewers haven’t written 11 novels. Many of them haven’t written one.
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don’t think I’m very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
You think you have a memory; but it has you!
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
Sometimes that’s a year, sometimes it’s 18 months, where all I’m doing is taking notes. I’m reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
And never forget, there is memory.
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.