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.

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.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

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

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.