I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

It feels like the world is folding up around me, like origami paper, and I’m trapped inside of its breathless center.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

We are not on this earth to accumulate victories, things, and experiences, but to be whittled and sandpapered until what's left is who we truly are.

I dont believe you need high capacity magazines to go hunt. If you have to use 100 rounds to shoot a deer, youre in trouble.

... All these preparations clearly show that a human being must perfect himself in the physical world through his magical development in order to be prepared for the higher astral world after death.

I love great locations in movies, and I couldn't believe I'd never seen a landfill on screen before. It was the most haunting place.

You'll understand when I'm dead.

No wonder politicians love government schools. Where do you think the dumb masses come from that can be so easily led and manipulated?

God in my mind gives you what you need. So, if you need God to be a black woman and you need that for whatever your reasons are, then perhaps your blessings will come in that form.