My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.

We write about what we don't know about what we know.

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.

As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.