The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

I write in American slang.

English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless.

There are certain things that ordinary people have that celebrities don't have.

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.

In America, if you don't do a 100 million dollars, you've done nothing.

Is anything accidental?

If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.

You can really do more than you think you can do.

I was a precocious reader.

When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

I never learned to read music.

I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I believe that interest in heroes is universal and eternal.

Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.

If it's not American, the French won't go see it.

Chaos is the enemy of Order but the enemy of Chaos is also the enemy of Order.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.