I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book's chances because they've missed the point, the tone, everything.

People forget years and remember moments.

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock.

Clichés so often befall vain people.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

You know how I love talking about books, and you know how I adore receiving compliments.

The cynicism doesn't come across in the final; it can be taken as a very sincere plea for someone to not go away.

This is a business, and I'll deal with it when it comes. If it comes, it comes.

The trick to following someone without getting caught is to follow somebody who doesn't think they're being followed.

I became hysterical and frightened and begged for sedation. And that was just the first prenatal visit.

When children reach the age of sixteen, they discover the meaning of life: car keys.

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.

The Rich Man's Banquet, which was to last for a decade, had now begun: the feast, it was recognised, went to the greediest.

The western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.