Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.

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.

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.