“Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that animates us. ”

“We are greater than the sum of our parts.”

“I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts.”

“I like the idea of something greater than us. We destroy things with our curiosity. We shatter with our best intentions. We are no closer to perfection than we were one hundred years ago, or five hundred.”

“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most”

“And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?”