It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.