Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.