Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

[Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.