"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

Suspense is achieved by information control: What you know. What the reader knows. What the characters know.

Bill Clinton is a man who thinks international affairs means dating a girl from out of town.

There is a long and honorable tradition of citizens in service to their nation that goes back at least as far as Cincinnatus, the Roman citizen who, more than once answered his country's call, then returned to his farm and his family and his work.

I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.

The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny-uncultured-yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.