Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible... It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.

there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.

Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.