I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

History is a vision of God's creation on the move.

If desires are not uprooted, sorrows grow again in you.

A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.

Personally I think we're over-specialized. Why it's getting so we have experts who concentrate only on the lower section of a specimen's left ear.

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.