Most people dont think about race as much as I do. They dont have to.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Reality—there’s nothing but horror in that.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists.

Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

Most people who aspire to be president don't have a foreign policy andnational security background. The exception was certainly Hillary Clinton.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.

We had a rule in the school that when you're punished, you carry out the punishment and then complain, which I felt was absolutely unfair: if I'd done it, what was the point of complaining?

Every major criminal case is always built from the bottom up. You get the underlings, you get them to plead and cooperate, and that leads to the higher-ups.

What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.