It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the business of thinking up a new book. But I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

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

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.

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

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.