| Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes. |
| Writing is simply one thought after another dying upon the one before. |
| Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. |
| Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating. |
| Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. |
| Writing is nothing more than a guided dream. |
| Writing is just a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to make it come out right. |
| Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering. |
| Writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation. |
| Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers. |