We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.