Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.