We are infinitely more than our limitations and afflictions.
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.
The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.
When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
America hasn't been leading anything. We have been blamed the last eight years [2008-2016]. The United States has been nothing special about us. American exceptionalism was mocked and laughed at.
Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.
Everything is just electricity and magnetism; everything is only an illusion. The reality is in the spiritual plane.
All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.