The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

A high church for the true mediocre.

There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.