As I have yet to meet a gentleman I wished to spend the rest of my days with, I would say the failure was on their part rather than mine.
At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.
I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.
Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.
In literature, you know only what you imagine
No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.
For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.
I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.
Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?
'Darkness on the Edge of Town' came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs.
The demon of acedia -- also called the noonday demon -- is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. . . . He makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and. . . he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.