The image-managers encourage the individual to fashion himself into a smooth coin, negotiable in any market.

The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

One of the many interesting challenges nature presents us is its apparent disinterest in maintaining the order humans crave.

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--

What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience.

Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.