“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses...”

“Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go...”

“I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure th...”

“...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.”

“I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became m...”

“All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told usfictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt che...”

“What it means to be a better person, then, must be concrete and practical that is to say, concerned with peoples political situations as a whole rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with...”

“What it means to be a ‘better person’, then, must be concrete and practical — that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole — rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only...”

“Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.”

“Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.”

“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book tak...”

“While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of t...”

“...[N]ature generally in the distribution of her capacities has adapted the means to the end... [so nature's] true destination must be to produce a will, not merely good as a means to something els...”

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”