I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.