I’ve been thrashed by the critics. I love having critics for breakfast. I’ve been having them for 30 years in Mexico - just eating them like chicken and then throwing the bones away. They have not survived, I have!

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.

For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.