What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.