“I need, therefore I dream. I take risks and sometimes I am hurt. But without risks there is no life. I have a history. We all have a history. I write to struggle against my silence. We all have the basic need and desire to be heard and understood.”

“History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?”

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.”

“I can’t be Pollyanna all the time. There is a certain risk in what we do. We have the power to make someone’s dream come true, but we also have the power to crush it forever.”

“Like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.”

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.”