Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

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

Desire has no history.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

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.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all