Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows.

Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.

As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.