Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon

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.

A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.