“Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.”

“It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.”

“I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.”

“I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the indust...”

“I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it pro...”

“I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of thes...”

“I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.”

“Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix.”

“Pride is ugly. It says, 'If you succeed, I am a failure.'”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write.”

“What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.”

“I'm pretty sure this is it for the teen movie thing. It's so frustrating to read when you get to page 20 and you're like, Oy! It's the same thing again!”