“Freud is famously supposed to have asked, ‘Lord, what do women want?’ Imagine a world in which it seems normal to inquire, ‘Lord, what do men want?’…but who can imagine such a world?”

“I’ve got this thing—my mind—it gets bigger, its appetite is insatiable. It’s not that I’ve sacrificed everything to it, but that it’s the only thing that works.”

“I think the highest duty of a writer is to write well—to leave the language in better rather than worse shape after one’s passage. That’s an ethical obligation. Language is the body, and also the soul, of consciousness.”

“Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.”

“The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation⎯however minute. I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change everything.”