I want to save my soul, that timid wind.

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

It is passivity that dulls feeling.