If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.