The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.

The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.

it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.