Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.