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I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

I've tried to quit writing several times, but I enjoy it too much.