I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

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.