I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.

I don't deny or affirm anything. I'm not very personal.

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

I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.

Since there is no system of public education, the great majority of my fellow citizens is frighteningly ignorant. They have no idea where Iraq is. They accept as the gospel whatever the government tells them. Good grief, any other normal country would have been against the Iraq war! But we live in an abnormal country, governed by experts in deceptive advertising.

Populists have never had a good press in Freedom's land.

Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.