Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.