I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.