Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.

Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.

But I don't think people take bad advice. They've got intuition too, you know. In fact I'd be surprised if they take any advice at all.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

For me, writing something down was the only road out.

My wife used to say that her idea of hell would be marrying Ghandi, Ben said ... Think about it: Ghandi was always the good one. Everyone else looked so rude and loud and self-centered by comparison.

Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.

Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

Didn't paintings lie also? They showed hours instead of minutes.

How plotless real life was!

He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.