The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.