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1. Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It’s just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.
2. I wrote a great deal of a novel, ‘Winter’s Tale,’ on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.
3. When people ask me why is ‘Winter’s Tale’ a fantasy, I point out that it is not a fantasy.
4. Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.
5. The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.
6. If one accepts Hezbollah’s self-description as a resistance movement, in which case one must, in light of the fact that Hezbollah never ceases to provoke, view Israel’s mere existence as a continuing act of aggression, then Hezbollah has indeed shown that it can initiate conflict, resist, and survive.
7. My father ran London Films. He made films like ‘The Red Shoes,’ ‘The Third Man.’ And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.
8. Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
9. The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation — if you’re in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.
10. The British monarchy has the political and constitutional task of subtracting from the government and governors of Britain the papal and kingly airs that in America, because we have no such institution, unfortunately adhere to the president.
11. The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes.
12. In an interview, I lose control even of what I am, for it is the interviewer who edits me, finally, into what he thinks I am, and never have I been happy with someone else’s version of my life after that person has spent an entire two or three hours fathoming it.
13. As much as I love art, there is no art as fine as the world we have been given.
14. In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant.
15. I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to be at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness.
16. Not a single illegal immigrant should or need enter the United States, not one. Contrary to the common wisdom, the borders are easy to seal, and controlling entry is hardly totalitarian.
17. I don’t aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.
18. Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.
19. The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.
20. In the Freudian age, parents say to their children, ‘Don’t be defensive,’ meaning, ‘You have no argument,’ but I was born in the age of Rommel, when defense was considered an honorable thing.