The impossible is the least that one can demand.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go somewhere else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.