Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.