Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.
Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.
Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.
Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.
You said, ‘I love you.’ Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?
That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
As your lover describes you, so you are.
She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.
When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary.
The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.
I am getting much more political as I get older. It’s the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.
Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.
I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.
It’s true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn’t they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?