The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.