Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.