What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.
I hate my life. I’m at the point where I want to hear about other people’s lives. It’s like switching from fiction to biography.
We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That’s the way we chose to live. I’m prepared to defend it.
In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.
It’s true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.
Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.
I’ve always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.
Evil is movement towards void.
It’s not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.
The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.
You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.
Tourism is the march of stupidity.
May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
The language of my books has shaped me as a man.
Rushdie is a hostage.
People will always make comparisons.
I am very unmusical. I can’t carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.
One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
All who have their reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, empty as their deeds.