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.

[Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.

I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

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.