Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.