I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.

Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.