Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

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

My father once said there's a correlation between a nation's cuisine and its people: England, nice people, nasty food; France, nice food, nasty people; Spain, nice people, nasty food; Italy, nice people, nice food; and Germany, nasty food, nasty people. And I've always thought that there must be something terribly wrong with the German character - and that there is, really.

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.