“Perhaps one of the writer's tasks is to weave himself into others' pain.”

“Art has a noble task: to educate man. That's why the writer's part in our society is a most responsible one. The writers are the architects of human souls and the critics are the architects of the writer's souls.”

“A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.”

“A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...”

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

“If love and hate aren’t true opposites, perhaps neither are pleasure and pain—if you go far enough in one extreme, it resembles the other.”