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Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven't pushed yourself hard enough.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.