Planning to write is not writing.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.