Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

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

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And 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.

I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

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.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.