But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.