I learned my realism from guys like Kafka.

We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.

The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.

Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.

My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spellbound.

I see no reason to stop writing. But the reason isn't always one of your own. The mind is not invulnerable, and it can lose some of its powers.

Some ways of naming a generation are fruitful and some are not. Postmodernism is not. It doesn't really say anything.

What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain't. So, you can't worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

Somehow, since I became a family, every minute in which I am alone and not listening to two kids screaming in stereo feels like a vacation.

Now my soul is incarnate in my country, My body has swallowed her soul, And I and my country are one. My name is million, for I love and suffer for millions.

I must have been a failed football coach in a previous incarnation.

We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.

Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum.

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.