The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.

Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.