I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.

I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years.

If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.

If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

Never, never try to scope the market.

Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos.

Your mind always does worse things than people can show in a movie.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

My wife is my first audience. She's a tough lady, so I can't say that I ever scare her. Except, of course, when she sees me the way I look before breakfast.

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.