It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.