I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

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

Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.