“You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”

“History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...”

“Good writing is always new.”

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”

“A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”

“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.”

“The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.”

“The willingness to reach inside every part of yourself opens the door to total understanding. You place your entire identity on the line, not just an isolated part. This may sound daunting, but act...”

“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”

“Swimming against the current is not idiotic if the waters are racing toward a waterfall.”

“The basic idea underlying religion is to create an atmosphere for the spiritual development of the individual.”