Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.