Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.

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.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.