Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

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.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.

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.