A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules.

We live for books.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.