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

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

...and yet I am what they think I am.

Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.