It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

It's not the size of the girl in the fight that counts... it's the size of the fight in the girl! -MISS MARVEL

Give as much as importance to your goal as you give it to your first girlfriend, with that much importance your girlfriend might still leave you but your goal will definitely come to you.

When inspiration does not come, I go for a walk, go to the movie, talk to a friend, let go... The muse is bound to return again, especially if I turn my back!

You are going to visit the land of marvels.

Those who cry to be young again should think twice before they seal those prayers.

I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.

Smiling is mostly about smiling more.

A menial task which must be mine, that shall I glorify and make an art of it.