Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.