To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.

What I really like to do is to sit quietly and write. All that other stuff is a problem. Publication to reception to negotiation to... everything, it's a problem. And I like to sit outside for long periods of time and just be in the tranquility of nature. That's what I like.

Particularly as a Jew, I don't like missionary work. I've had it focused on me, and I don't like it. Let people be what they want to be.

I follow my own nose. So I read things that are different. People will always say to me, "Have you read Robert S. Bosco's latest novel?" or "Have you read so and so's history of Peru, which is reviewed in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and has a buzz about it?" I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm like from another planet. I'm a pygmy from the jungle.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation - if you're in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.

Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.