In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

Why can't we repeat 8th grace five times and call that a high school education?

I always want to give the victim a voice.

Age doesn't mean anything. Its all in your head. Men get sexier with age. They also get wiser and get experienced.

I have never seen a man as fond of virtue as of women.

Exactly as we might ask God, and do ask God, to change our fate. The difference is that in the story the writer actually replies and in the end even changes his mind.

Things don't just happen; things happen just.

Don't write slogans, write truths.

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.

I am lucky to be in a profession that is not age dependent.

The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.