He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.

Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.

As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people's life.

In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.

Most of them were murderers. But when I went there to talk, they were the nicest people. I did a reading. I said, "Thank you," and then they said to me, "Could you talk some more?" And I said, "Why?" and they answered, "Most of us are in solitary confinement, so the moment you finish talking, they take us back to our cells. We like hanging out here together."