Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.

Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.