The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Facts are lonely things.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

There is a world inside the world.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.