American literature has always been immigrant.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.