When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what's going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it's trouble. Monkeys make trouble.

It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you-incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.

Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.