The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

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.

Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.