It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

Having no talent is no longer enough.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

You will be favourable to Burr, and so must fail because the American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth, Washington the greatest man that ever lived, Burr the wickedest, and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader's attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.

In the town of Ravella, where I have a house, when the Supreme Court said that an act of sodomy, as they describe it, could not be committed between a man and his wife, the entire square burst into laughter.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.