I was always the kid on scholarship, I was a soloist with my company, I'd been working with the symphony since I was 14.
I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.
In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.
But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.