“Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists...Essentially the serious novelist should do what s/he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.”

“Listen, nothing's better than being useful. Tell me how, at the present moment, I can be most of of use. I know it's not for you to decide that, but I'm only asking for your opinion. You tell me, and what you say I swear I'll do! Well, what is the great thought?""Well, to turn stones into bread. That's a great thought.""The greatest? Yes, really, you have suggested quite a new path. Tell me, is it the greatest?""It's very great, my dear boy, very great, but it's not the greatest. It's great but secondary, and only great at the present time. Man will be satisfied and forget; he will say: 'I've eaten it and what am I to do now?' The question will remain open for all time.”

“Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.That includes women. Most especially women ...To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children.”

“A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an “idea” already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form.”

“There's no question about it. The arts are an extremely high-risk situation. People are willing to take these extraordinary chances to become writers, musicians or painters, and because of them we have a culture. If this ever stops, our culture will die, because most of our culture, in fact, has been created by people that got paid nothing for it-- People like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh or Mozart. So, yes, it's a very foolish thing to do, notoriously foolish, but it seems human to attempt it anyway.”

“The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.”