“She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own...”

“She was starting to feel a little like a hamburger at a dieters’ convention. Nobody was likely to snack on her, but absolutely everybody noticed she was edible.”

“Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”

“Chomsky's writings are "classics" in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

“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”