Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.

Not erotic life, but the pleasure of the mind filling like the lower chamber of an hourglass with the slow-moving grains of a perfect day – sky, carnations, walking, reading, writing, Toasted Cheese, the presence of another who wishes to be so still, so silent too.

The artist’s work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And something terrible resides at the heart of wonder. Celebration is social, amenable. Wonder has a chaotic splendor.

Faith in our time can seem like signing on the dotted line of a prefab doctrine composed of absurdities.

We have chosen a problematic name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we’re all consumers now, grasping all the stuff every which way.

Poverty didn’t necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

Planes are my foxhole. I’m always on my knees in them.

We must set out, often without a destination, with only the instinct to search as a direction. Literature and religion are predicated on the notion of journey, movement – pilgrimage it’s called in religion, plot in literature.