When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.

Why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'