I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.

... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.