Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it /when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."

(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."

Outside The Whale (Granta, 1984)

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.