Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

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

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.