Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

There is a world inside the world.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

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.