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

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

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.

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.

The magic will which makes us see the other side of our natures-dream and disaster, catastrophe and fulfillment-is the great permanent challenge of humanity.

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

With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk