Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.