Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

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

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.