A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.