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

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

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

...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)