“Anybody who becomes a movie star becomes successful at projecting a certain image to the public.”

“Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.”

“I always hope people will like me, and I'm always afraid they will think I'm a fraud. I try harder than perhaps I should to make people like me, then it backfires. They think I'm a buffoon.”

“I don't think I've left a trail of weeping women in my wake. I mean, the number of serious relationships I've had has not been into double digits.”

“I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.”

“I feel that there's a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.”

“I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.”

“I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.”

“I think a lot of the people who write about me think that if they had to write fewer interviews then they would transcribe their life-story and it would be a big success. Or should be.”

“If being a spokesman for a generation is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it.”

“I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.”

“I'm afraid that - not necessarily deliberately, but consistently - I've made a kind of laboratory out of my life, where I mix the stuff in the test tubes to create explosions - possibly resulting in interesting by-products. I mean, not deliberately - I'd be crazy to deliberately do that - or maybe not.”

“It's the cynics who never get married.”

“Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.”

“Mine is not an autonomous imagination.”

“Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.”

“My former wife is a very eccentric woman, which is why I still love her.”

“'Socialist' is the nastiest thing you can say about an American politician in some quarters.”

“Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.”

“The definition of gumbo is almost as slippery as that of Creole. Just as gumbo can contain pretty much any kind of meat or seafood, Creole is a vague and inclusive term for native New Orleanians, who may be black or white, depending on whom you're asking.”

“There aren't many shy writers left.”

“There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.”

“There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.”

“We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.”

“When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.”

“You know, I'm always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.”