When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.