The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I'll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.