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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.”

“People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.”

“Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.”