He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everythingin every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

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