Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

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

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.

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.