the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.

I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined drama that engaged me.