“If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.”

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.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.

Blah, blah, blah. What’s a crime? What’s criminality? What can you do, what can’t you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn’t really make sense.

People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Sometimes as human beings, we’re so contradictory – we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves.

That’s why I always question this sense. The feeling of home really requires a lot of trust. It requires you to identify with it, which I always find myself very contradictory to.

Sometimes our motivations can be quite hazy, contradictory and multi-faceted, in real life.