If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it.

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.