Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse