Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

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