While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

I've always said that the big difference between South America and North America with regard to the native population is that in North America they raped them and killed them, and in South America they raped them and married them. The mix was much greater, and that was very good.

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