God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

That is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Power, for the writer lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

I am nobody but myself.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'