Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that "reader" is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.

We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

I think the path for a young writer might be one that says, "I have to accept myself, this is what I am. I can't eradicate my defects. I can work on them."

An artist's job is to be interested in things as they are.

Some of Buddhist texts say that, in the moment after you die, you think of New Jersey and you go to New Jersey or you think of 1820 and you go to 1820. Also, all your sort of inner-symbology gets writ large. So, if you're a Christian, you see Christian iconography.