in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal.

No man worth his salt does not wish to be a husband and father; yet no man is raised to be a husband and father and no man would ever conceive of those relationships as instruments of his prime function in life. Yet every woman is raised, still, to believe that the fulfillment of these relationships is her prime function in life and, what's more, her instinctive choice.

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.

They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.

It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.