“As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.”

“The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.”

“I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.”

“My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.”

“She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.”

“I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.”

“Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.”