Americans have a warrior's mentality, most of them. That's how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.

I think the spirit survives when we die, and nothing is wasted in nature and just as our material body disintegrates and becomes something else in the soil. The spirit becomes something else, reunites with a spiritual force that is out there in the universe. Not as individuals but as part of this spirituality.

If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.

Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.

When a man's earning his living doing things he doesn't like, he feels like a slave; when he's doing what he loves, he feels like a prince.

That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies.

I'm not above anybody. I'm, I'm not better than anybody. I am made of the same material that everybody else is and if somebody can be a saint, so can I and if somebody can be a torturer, so can I.