Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

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.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.