The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.