“There'll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck doesn't he?”

“I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”

“God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.”

“As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.”

“he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.”

“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”

“He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.”