I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.

You are built to pull a cart, to lift a heavy load and bear it, to haul up the long slope, and so am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid shapely dark glazed clay pots that can stand on the fire.

People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed.

One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.

I think that if you use something from you life in fiction, it metamorphosizes into something strange and different. Afterward it is hard to tell what actually was part of your life and what is part of the story of the fictional character.

Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street.