I'm a writer, not a genre.

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.