I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.