I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.

Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.