Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.

A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.