Painters and poets have liberty to lie.
Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.
Talk isn't work. Work is when you have pages in the evening that you didn't have in the morning.
The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.
As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.
Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.
The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.
We give a lot of others significance in our lives even when they don't deserve it. It doesn't matter if they're family or if you've known them forever. If they're not good for you, they've got to go.
If a woman wants to fly, first of all she must, of course, abandon skirts and don a knickerbocker uniform.
Creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and often more accessible.