Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

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.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

it's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.