Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.

It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.

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.

I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

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.