I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.

People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair".... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.