The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.

Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.