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.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go somewhere else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.