The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. [...] If you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.

I haven't had a single moment of terror since they told me [I was dying]. My only regret is to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I'm quite happy to go.