The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

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

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. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.