When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.