“So many television marriages -that playing out of lives against a background of the tube.Instead of two lives filing the room,There are their two lives and the eleven o'clock news withConstant commercial interruption.Instead of what you say and what I say.You don't laugh with me;I don't laugh with you.All the wit comes pouring out of the tube.And we laugh at it together.The more we avoid talkingthe more passive the relationship becomes.Television permits us to walk through lifewith minor speaking parts.And the more we fail to speak,the more difficult speaking becomes”

“The longer children live on the street, the more they realize the meaninglessness of words. They don't say things such as 'Thank you' and 'you are my friend.' They'd rather show through their actions what is inside. It is more difficult for these street kids to speak than to act.”

“What we speak becomes the house we live in.”

“They can laugh, but they can't deny us. They can curse and kill us, but they can't destroy us. This land is ours because we come out of it, we bled in it, our tears watered it, we fertilized it with our dead. So the more of us they destroy, the more it becomes filled with the spirit of our redemption.”

“...speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...”

“I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: "speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying 'we all.'" Excuse me, gentleman, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more "living" than you.”