“Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.”

I’m not really a mass market writer.

I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

I read very little contemporary anything.

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.

If you’re a writer, you’re always working.

I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I’m a genre writer.

I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said

I don’t inflict horrors on readers.

The situation began to change, revolutionary conditions was created…we simply wanted to change the regime.

I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I’m always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses.

This poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros’s compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.

When I realized they had me pegged as a foreign nobleman type I began to live the part, too.

Let’s not forget: This all began when you had eight- and nine-year-old children writing graffiti on walls.

Iran began a policy of expanding its revolution, of interfering with the affairs of its neighbors

Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.