... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.