Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.

I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

I'm too conceited for therapy.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.