A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.

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

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.