It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves.

For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.

I may cause someone to feel badly, not because I'm doing something to them, but because the way in which I see might cause pain. But I am not doing the hurting.

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

You are the instrument of your own illumination.

Of course love is a force in life. People will go on falling in love forever. And more important, sexual infatuation will enrapture everyone. Otherwise, no babies!