Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.