It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire.(The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.)"(Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme, 1738)

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

I’ll write the first sentence in English and the second sentence will be nonsense translated to Russian, to make the ultimate non sequitur.

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Don’t be shown up by a baboon

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.