“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.”

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

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.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Reading is good for your imagination.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

Imagine doing your job at the highest level to where you’re not needed anymore.

You may think I’m small, but I have a universe inside my mind.

Imagine painting all the statues in the world in the color of the sky