The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.