Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.