Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.