Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

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.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.