What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.