“A desert is a place without expectation.”

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more – absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.

All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

There’s no tiling moral about beauty.

Books dont need batteries

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

On the one hand, I want to go off and live in the desert with my dog and sculpt things out of adobe.

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.

He was an ocean of pure love but after what he had to go through, now he’s a desert of hopeless romance.

Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.

Oh, Lord! You’ve been with me in six troubles, don’t desert me in the seventh!

Love is wild; its whole beauty is in its wildness. It comes like a breeze with great fragrance, fills your heart, and suddenly where there was a desert there is a garden full of flowers.

Rain generate hope in the desert so as her touch in me.  

What makes the desert beautiful,’ said the little prince, ‘is that somewhere it hides a well.