Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing - a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily 'politicized.'

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human bei…

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment…

I think everybody is covering their posteriors with the Enron scandal and it was very convenient that Sept. 11 came along to deflect the fact that they should …

There's a whole industry of conservatives saying, 'Ah, it's those damn liberals,' and a whole group of liberals saying, 'It's all those damn conservatives'... …

[at Alpine Valley, 2007] 'A couple of months back when we played this show at Coachella, Valley, that was our first show back, I said a few things from the sta…