People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.