Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

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