People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.

If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever.

If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.