Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.