The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

I certainly felt I had an idea of World War II, and it's probably the idea that many people share: there was this insane aggressor, and there was really only one way to proceed in resisting him. What I didn't realize is that there were many voices belonging to reasonable, interesting, complicated people who had a different way of interpreting the possible responses to the Hitlerian menace.

Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.