What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.

Without communism ... our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be - who else? the people of the United States.

I am a correctionist. If something is wrong in society, it must be fixed. At least one should try to fix it.

The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.

I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.

I write in different styles because I hear different voices in my head. It would be boring to have always the same voice, point of view.

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