Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.

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

The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography