Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Facts are generally over-esteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the skin.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can't be explained.

Have faith. May you surround yourself with parents, editors, mates and children as tolerant and supportive as mine have been. But the essential support and encouragement of course comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.