I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

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

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.

Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.