Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Look here, my boy, if you have average intelligence, about half the things you do are bound to be right, which is a fair achievement for any career. Don't spend sleepless nights over them.

I will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

Do you know what I'm working on now? My first feature as a director.

Dead he is not, but departed, for the artist never dies.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

You say their stories, it is gift they give you.

It's not appropriate to joke about the Ku Klux Klan.

The only work I've done the last two years is interviews. I'm very good at it.