We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.