"You ask if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some sca…"

"Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when."

"Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he'd been in years?."

"When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and …"

"Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previo…"

"Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology."

"Probably I couldn’t have done any worse—I might well have done a lot better—seeking solace from the two nuns on the L…"

"There’s a plot afoot all right, and I’ll gladly name the forces propelling it—hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity,…"

"I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote …"

"It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence…"