Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out "loner" who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.