There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

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

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.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

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.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.