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?

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

Planning to write is not writing.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

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.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.