The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.
For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.
Acting is the loneliest profession I know.
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
I don’t think that any ‘ism’ is higher than literature or art. So I’m a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.
Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?
The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.
Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.
It’s one of those secrets that’s embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.
I work very slowly. It’s like building a ladder, where you’re building your own ladder rung by rung, and you’re climbing the ladder. It’s not the best way to build a ladder, but I don’t know any other way.
A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino’s, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer’s vision.