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.

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.

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.

In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.