Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.

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.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.

I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible.