He was a brilliant man, a complex man. The march justified him as a military man, but he had a great deal of guilt about it, and when the war was over he immediately left his troops and went down to do rescue-and-recovery operations. He wanted to rehabilitate the people he'd been destroying and dispossessing.

Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

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

I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life, insects unfolded from sacs on the surface of still waters and were instantly on prowl for their dinner, everything that came into being knew at once what to do and did it, unastonished that it was what it was, unimpressed by where it was, the great earth heaving up bloodied newborns from every pore, every cell, bearing the variousness of itself from every conceivable substance which it contained in itself, sprouting life that flew or waved in the wind or blew from the mountains or stuck to the damp black underside of rocks, or swam or suckled or bellowed or silently separated in two.

My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.