Being a failure at living your own life as best as you can is better than being a success living the life somebody else says you should live.

The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination...Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.

Goodness was not a trait you acquired; it was a value you practiced when you were on the verge of doing evil.

Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.

I write because the lives of all of us are stories. If enough of those stories are told, then perhaps we will begin to see that our lives are the same story. The differences are merely in the details.

To write and not tell the truth? That would be death for any writer. But more, it would be death to the imagination. And if the imagination dies, what would happen to the souls of children?

We remember with our emotions. The things that were important in our emotional life, that's what we remember.