I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

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

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.