I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

I am nobody but myself.

I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.