We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.

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.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

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

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.