The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That I think is valuable. In terms of actually tweeting myself, I have just lost enthusiasm for it. Maybe I'll do some of it this week to tell people about the PEN Festival and encourage them to show up.

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.