I wrote a novel called "Blonde," which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.