He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.

All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.