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

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

A desert is a place without expectation.

The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

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.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.