Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.
You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
Our lives teach us who we are.
Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.
This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
The world is a very abnormal place.
The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.
Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.