I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.