"I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others."

"It's where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are."

"Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply."

"Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."

"The worst cynicism: a belief in luck."

"The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people."

"I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency."

"Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?"

"When we lay together, she showed me her soul, and I showed her mine, and they were the same. As you can imagine, mine was battered and bruised, tarnished like ancient metal. She scrubbed it clean. I cannot deny my own soul any more than I can deny she held it in her hands for a time."

"It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power."

"Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance."

"Death is just the last scene of the last act."

"It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory."

"The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events."

"Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing."

"Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents."

"For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable."

"Only where there is life can there be home."

"When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life."

"Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose."

"A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?"

"My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand."

"Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality."

"The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future."

"I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days."

"Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest."

"Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism."

"The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives."

"He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life."

"Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision."

"Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy."

"The worst cynicism a belief in luck."

"Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms."

"Sebastian tapped his index finger on the polished wood thoughtfully. Yes, it was a universal truth: some things once broken were broken forever-like trust. It might be patched up and smoothed over, but it would always be the thing that had once been shattered."

"Boxing has become America's tragic theater."

"If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?"

"Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding."

"When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)"then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly"why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing."

"Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart."

"I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many 'culturally-mandated' differences. In First World countries we've evolved beyond mere biology -it isn't the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies."

"Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity."

"The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency."

"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."

"I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily."

"Deep down under where his heart resided, strangled up in thorny vines of guilt, anger, fear and longing, there lay something deeper in him, something that he couldn't see but she could."

"Popular! In America, what else matters?"

"And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices."

"It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort."

"Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them."

"Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas."