I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death

Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.

I'm in favor of sexual encounters.