I Hated Being A Novelist

I Cannot Bear Not To Know The End Of A Tale. I Will Read The Most Trivial Things – Once Commenced – Only Out Of A Feverish Greed To Be Able To Swallow The Ending – Sweet Or Sour – And To Be Done With What I Need Never Have Embarked On. Are You In My Case? Or Are You A More Discriminating Reader? Do You Lay Aside The Unprofitable?

I Am Not An Academic Who Happens To Have Written A Novel. I Am A Novelist Who Happens To Be Quite Good Academically.

Narration Is As Much A Part Of Human Nature As Breath And The Circulation Of The Blood.... Storytelling Is Intrinsic To Biological Time, Which We Cannot Escape. Life, Pascal Said, Is Like Living In A Prison From Which Every Day Fellow Prisoners Are Taken Away To Be Executed. We Are All, Like Scheherazade, Under Sentence Of Death, And We All Think Of Our Lives As Narratives, With Beginnings, Middles And Ends.

Once You Get Older, People Stop Listening To What You Say. It's Very Agreeable Once You Get Used To It.

It's A Terrible Poison, Writing.