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Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

The reality of the writer's world is that you set yourself up for disappointment with every success that you deliver because with every success you raise your readers' expectations.

Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.

I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.

I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

I think readers' imaginations are far more powerful than anything you can put on a page and, therefore, can conjure up graphic images for themselves, which I think you just have to nudge them towards.