When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.