One always likes one's latest book best. That's a natural feeling.

I've never worked for a newspaper. I've had some very bad reviews in newspapers.

Lee Harvey Oswald was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians-he was mad at them because they wouldn't let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn't think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassina­tion when I saw his picture flashed on television.

Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.