Writers create Houses of the Imagination, from whose doors the generations greet each other.

Novels do not drop ready written from the skies. Your couple of hours' reading is my half year's work.

Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

Writing is an act of generosity toward other people.

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.

Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.

one learns best, and writes best, in a state of defiance.