America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency-a chaos-, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being