Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

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.'

I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.

Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.