“Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.”

“[Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.”

“- Is recycling to do with global warming?- Need you ask?- Well, I only ask because we've been recycling for twenty years or so, and no one was talking about global warming back then.”

“Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do because they don’t depend on material in the same way.”

“I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.”

“The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. ”

“The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.”