A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think that it is less and less possible to take for granted certain cultural references.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.