Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more about order than freedom, more about conformity than singularity.

Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.

I was raised a right-wing Republican and was about eighteen when I had to admit to myself that in regards to the great domestic crucible of the day, civil rights and racial justice, conservatives were on the wrong side historically and morally, and that it took too much intellectual and psychological jujitsu to pretend otherwise. I didn't want to pretend anymore; I wanted to be on the right side.