One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.