I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

The past was so past it hurt.

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

Power is a game, and in games you do not judge your opponents by their intentions but by the effects of their actions.

If miracles represent prophecy, we must have more prophets in twenty first century than the entire human history.

Diligence and hard work sensitize you to recognize opportunity.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.

I look really odd in jeans and a hoodie - it doesn't feel or seem right.

One of the high points of my career was winning the Grammy for 'I Will Survive.'

Tomorrow's destiny becomes today's direction.

When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely... Having a big family solves that problem.

Never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.