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

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

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art