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" I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation. "

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" There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos. "

" 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. "

" To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving. "

" It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "

" I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. "

" I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks. "

" In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere. "

" I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them. "

" Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society. "

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

" Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer. "

" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "

" I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech. "

" Movies are too literal. "

" Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars. "

" There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. "

" The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. "

" Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially. "

" The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. "

" People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction. "

" My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.' "

" My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. "

" Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice. "

" Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. "

" Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. "

" History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. "

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

" A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework. "

" I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page. "

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