The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts 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.

It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.