Knowledge is a collective enterprise. Without it understanding is impossible. Ignorance is too often a murderous vulnerability.

The real power of books is their deep companionability. We learn from them as we learn from the deep companionability of love to know our own hearts and minds better.

I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.