Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

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.