When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.
I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.