"You can't win unless you learn how to lose."

"I enjoy seeing new places."

"The '80s made up for all the abuse I took during the '70s. I outlived all my critics. By the time I retired, everybody saw me as a venerable institution. Things do change."

"I tell kids to pursue their basketball dreams, but I tell them to not let that be their only dream."

"I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material."

"When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints."

"I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen."

"If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?"