I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?

There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.

A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It's an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out or getting behind.

While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left - not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc.

To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.