The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

I didn't intend. The word "intend" is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word "intend" is wrong. The word "pressure" is right. It's like any art form.

Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.

I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships . . . and also a few enmities.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.