The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.

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.

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

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