I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.