Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]

I deny that there's such a thing as a gay person. I deny there's such a thing as a heterosexual person.

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.

These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also.