You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, t….

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing..

Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theatre. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honourable dealings t….

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them..

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins..

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon..

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them..

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction..

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for..

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like..

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy..

The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles..

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and render….

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card..

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the….

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way..

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your be….

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reas….

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life..

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake..

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go..