I don’t know what it’s like to read this book. I only know what it was like to live the writing of it.

Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.