I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!"

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.