A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.

The object of war is to survive it.

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.