The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.

I would be literally patrician in the sense that the senators in ancient Rome were called conscript fathers, paters, from which comes the word patrician. So if you come from a senatorial family, you are literally patrician in that sense, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't be Billy Carter, you know, of recent memory.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

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

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

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