Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.