Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

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

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.