Keeping people neurotic and depressed and ignorant and self-doubting is oppressive.

Doing the right thing for someone else was like a tonic for me; it was like some magic ointment that made a wound disappear

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

I'm like the kid in kindergarten; I really do send valentines to everyone.

Familiarity with your lover is what initially makes sex really good.

Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it's so hard to be read.