If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.

Some of the things I hated my parents for when I was younger are the same things I love my parents for now that I'm older.

Every person has something meaningful to say in the conversation of life.

I was told 50 percent of the population gets cancer. Everybody is going to be affected.

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

Brazil is where I have to be, where I have my roots.

You have to reinvent yourself.

To lie is vile, to tell truth is excellent, if not noble.

Hollywood is a cross between a health farm, a recreation center and an insane asylum. It's a company town, and I happen to like the company!

It's not that diabetes, heart disease, and obesity runs in your family...It's that no one runs in you family!