Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.