Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. I’ve sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

We're inches apart yet worlds away.

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.

Never think, because you cannot write a letter easily, that it is better not to write at all. The most awkward note imaginable is better than none.

I left the Midwest feeling like, "People are small-minded, they don't want to ask questions, they don't want to think out of the box." Some of that was true.

The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionised, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy... luminous energy.

Whom men fear they hate, and whom they hate, they wish dead.

In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.