You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.