Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?

When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.