I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.

His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways...while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness.

You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.