“We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.”

You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.

If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I value my correspondence with writers…

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.

It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.

I believe that we need to slow down.

Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.

Most people have learned to live in the moment.

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.

Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.

I want to make sure I am still here to make sure my two young [sons] become men.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

When I was young, I never wanted to leave the court until I got things exactly correct. My dream was to become a pro.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.