I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

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.

It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.

I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

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