I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling.

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.