We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

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

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. Then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!