Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory...

I would rather write a book without a title if my true friend chooses to live in a million dollar home in London and acts foreign.

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

Do not advise too much: do the job yourself. This is the only advice you can give to others. Do it and others will follow.

There is only one secret. To love what you are doing.

Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.

You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?

We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.

Film is a collective experience, as you know.