“Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do.”

Living gives you a better understanding of life.

An apex is always surrounded only by emptiness

I try to challenge myself as much as possible, as often as possible.

Besides the mistakes that are pointed out, I love the way readers become involved with the characters.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

I write early in the morning, usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web.

Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal.

So rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

The storm hit with all the fury of a woman who’d been dieting for six months, only to discover she’d gained four pounds.

Enjoying consciousness every now and then for a second or so before splitting up to become bits and pieces of trees and stars and french fries.

Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.

I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities.

Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer.

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

Good writing … involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Writing, for me, is a search for God.