Life is an X-rated soap opera.

The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.

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.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.