I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species ….

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue..

The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimat….

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to l….

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this….

In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that..

I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of th….

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything..

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, ab….

Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if you tried to separate ….

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than th….

I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be gra….

I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignit….

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil..

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else..

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath..

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you ….

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul..

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one..

Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist..

Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are inter….