“I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.”

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.

The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

I blundered into writing.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understand, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.

That’s the amazing thing about music: there’s a song for every emotion. Can you imagine a world with no music? It would suck.

Imagination is lost in reality’s cruelty.

Don’t be a slave to modern vices, Chasing false merit, distraction untoward. Take time for yourself, to be alone with your thoughts. Imagination the real reward.

I am not from the Earth. I am from a place artist are obsessed with. A place where everything makes sense from the point of view of imagination, but not human intelligence.

The death of imagination is the end of all possibility.

Anything you can imagine probably is doable, you just have to imagine it and work on it.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.