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The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox, I felt to be a truth.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

I don't understand it when people get cross about how one of their works was adapted and say, 'Oh, they ruined it!' Well, the book is still there.

My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.

I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.'

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.