Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character’s mind and emotions.

All day you have been on my mind, a steam iron pressing the convolutions from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.

Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future.

I don’t even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.

We lie in each other’s arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

Every poet has a certain amount of “stuff.” That’s what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

I’m probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.

The ruling class isn’t dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.

I don’t apologize for being sexually adventurous. Why not? It was often fun. When it wasn’t – I didn’t continue what wasn’t pleasant.

People are very afraid of any controversy. We’ve become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization – quite reasonably – they really got bashed.