The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

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.

I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.