It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.