I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? Only verse: Nothing.

The time has come. I know you, and now you will know me. Ever Yours.

That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees.

Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.

Although I always loved reading and putting words on paper, I never thought about becoming a writer until I was twelve.

I want 'The Lady' magazine to be restored to its traditional place in the pantheon of weekly magazines.

I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.