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Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

I haven't read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.