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.

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.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.