We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.