It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.

You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.

Without stories, we are incomplete.

Books are really places, make no mistake about that.

Governments will be provided with the choice of either accommodating themselves to co-ordinating proliferating human variety or seeking to reduce that variety by repressive measures.

There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists from the very onset of pregnancy.

Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

I can get ready in 10 minutes.

We value some lives more than others.

I would always wait to take you home.

Like an athlete, [dance] is an everyday job. You have to stay in shape - unless you just want to loaf through a couple of hoofing routines. But that just didn't satisfy me.

Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal.

Who are the slumlords in the Black community? The so-called Jews. … Who is it sucking our blood in the Black community? A white imposter Arab and a white imposter Jew.

writing is the most personal form of prayer.