“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are dee...”

“What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.”

“It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when...”

“Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.”

“Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.”

“How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total...”

“How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.”

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is...”

“The method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term method must be reinterpreted and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity...”

“The woman who is liberated must never cross the line in which we ask men to examine their actions; we are a country built on the ideas, ingenuity, canniness, and downright brutality of manto questi...”

“Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes a...”

“As we stood there, chest high in water, I felt like I was in the middle of my own romance novel.”

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express my...”