I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.
A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.
In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays.
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.
I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.
I just don't think most people put myself and Robert Frost in the same category.
I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography.
You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman... 'You never can tell...' he answered. 'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly. 'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!
I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.
I think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.
Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.
What happens to us all, I think, when we pick up a pen, is that we just become snobs.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.
I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.
I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
