I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

How would your life be different if instead of spending your energy and focus on hating those who hate you, you spent your energy and focus on loving those who love you?

Real love when it comes, it doesn't look like anything you'd expect.

Well, we're all going to die, so mortality is a part of writing and life.

If the Masters offered no money at all, I would be here trying just as hard.

Don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player!

Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

I made a ridiculous statement when I first went to North Carolina State. I said I know basketball down there was like life or death. It was very wrong. It's more important.

There is nothing so unpardonable as to consent to a senseless, aimless, purposeless life.

The law of Karma is the law of causation.