I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

We're swallowed up only when we are willing for it to happen.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.

Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium.

It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.

Mindfulness could also be described as "heartfulness" because it is really about a compassionate awareness.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

Does the universe exist only for me? It's possible. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.

If you behave like a celebrity, then people will treat you like a celebrity, and if you don't, they won't. There's not much to write about me in the tabloids.

Memory shrinks until it fits in a fist memory shrinks without forgetting

Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

The choices we make when we're broken are sometimes the most awful of all our choices.

My mother never forgave my father

There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.