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.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

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

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

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

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