If there was one thing worse than being cheated, it was being cheated by someone who referred to themselves in the third person.
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.
I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.
There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
I had rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory.
If you're afraid to take risks in anything in life, it's just boredom.
Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.
If you don't have a place to live or money or whatever, you ask yourself, "What am I gonna do?" But my best friend stuck by me for 30 years. And he had already told me "Whenever you get out, you come live with me and my wife. "