Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.

The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters build their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within.

Now that I'm in love, I haven't a clue. Now that I'm in love, I'm completely stupid on the subject.

I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.