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

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

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.