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.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

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.

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

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.