Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

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

There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.

You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.