Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.