Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

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

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.