Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

You write in order to change the world.