A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.