Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

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.

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.