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.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.