Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

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. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.