Literature presents you with alternate mappings of the human experience. You see that the experiences of other people and other cultures are as rich, coherent, and troubled as your own experiences. They are as beset with suffering as yours. Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people's lives--their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness.

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two

If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.

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.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.