How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.

I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.

I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.