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There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.

Our life is full of empty space.

Those of us who know the transporting wonder of a reading life know that it little matters where we are when we talk about books or meet authors or bemoan the state of publishing because when we read, we are always inside, sheltered in that interior room, that clean, well-lighted, timeless place that is the written word.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.