Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.

He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.

All that rejection from Republicans has a bit of a racist element. It was very necessary to have a black president, and it's been a great thing. It will help, in the end, to ease the trauma of slavery and civil war. The war against slavery cost almost 800,000 American lives - that's how strongly they felt about it. And it's not going to go away in a century.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.