Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action.