Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

All tastes are expressions of belief.