The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.

There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.