I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

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

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.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.