I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

In a democracy - even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one - the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

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

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.