A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.

God, living is enormous!

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.