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.

The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.

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

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.

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--

When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless.

I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!