Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Literature usually begets literature.

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.