A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.

I wasn't like other boys. At any rate, I wasn't like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.

Interviewing is not a democratic art.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

I'm not interested in writers who are overcome with certainty, with single-mindedness, or with a sense of how consistent and morally upstanding they are. My writers are in the thick of it and they seek the truth, rather than embody it, and sometimes they find truths that don't sit palatably or easily together. That's life. That's personality. And that's writing.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.