I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

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 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.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.