I always ask young writers, 'Are you certain you want to be a writer? If you're absolutely sure, then do it.' If you really want to write, writing has to take precedence over everything else, except for taking care of your loved ones. It has to be more important than any possession, more important than fame. We hear about just a few writers who get famous, but most of them don't. It's got to mean more than that.

Isolation from power makes men look for a mob in which they can be strong.

To construct a proper privacy, making it a privilege rather than a burden, we first need to construct a community-love, family, politics, art.

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

The fact that all of us die anyway (the rumor turns out to be true) is a mere detail in the celestial glow of imagination. The artist's eyes destroy death.

Old age is wasted on the elderly: the young know what to do with it-insist on something different.

If mankind is naturally good, he is sure going against his nature more and more of the time. It sounds like a bad joke: the paranoids are after us.