Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

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

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

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.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.