The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.

I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.