“But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in pas...”

“Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like cloth...”

“I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alon...”

“I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up...”

“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this thenour friends are not able to finish their stories.”

“For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”

“Being a writer all boils down to this: It's you, in a chair, staring at a page. And you're either going to stay in that chair until words are written, or you're going to give up and walk away. The ...”

“When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.”

“Im likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.”

“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want ...”

“I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.”

“Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to ...”

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”

“You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --”

“If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.”