If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?

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

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.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.