Cruelty is not a literary value.
Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot’s faster.
It’s Kennedy’s war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it’s Kennedy’s war.
A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.
My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
Killing people because you don’t like their ideas – it’s a bad thing.
Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.
It’s true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
It’s obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody’s work.
Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.
I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
I’m a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
I’m a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It’s not just what I like. It’s what I write about.
I’ll tell you what divorce hasn’t taught me. It didn’t teach me not to get married again.