I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

These little books I write, such as The End of Freedom, about the post-9/11 political climate in the United States, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Whereas, I hear novels on marriage are not selling. This is perhaps not the judgment of God, but it is certainly that of history.

I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.

Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.