He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.' We can't both be Alexander.' Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one's family was much worse. Humiliation of one's social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one's nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.

Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.