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

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.

It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

I'm in favor of sexual encounters.