Whatever I do in life, I'm almost always aware that there's another way to do it.

There's nothing about interdependence that would keep somebody from making art.

A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.

... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

The independents are the ones who tend to commit suicide. I'm not against this way of being in the world. Individuals have brought us many treasures. You can't just say that's a bad way of being in the world - it's not. But it's not everyone's way of being in the world.

It's a matter of whether you see the self as fundamentally in relationship to other selves or not - whether you see the boundary between self and the world as relatively permeable, which makes you "interdependent" (collectivist) in outlook, or relatively impermeable, which makes you "independent" (individualistic).

For students who are in the most creative group in America to somehow be presumed to be narrow is just completely meshugga.