It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.

I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.

Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.

Never cut loose from your longings.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.