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There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am.

One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.

I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can't write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.

People know that I am a very good author. But they would rather read what I have to say about the next election.

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

I don't make that hard and fast distinction between political and nonpolitical writing. I write about what bothers me.