I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.

You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

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

USA belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It's genius. It's like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through.

A good deed never goes unpunished.