If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
