Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.