I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

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'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.

It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.

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

I have made love to ten thousand women.