People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.

Employment is my right my destiny.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.