“And yet language is the most intimately physical of all the artistic means. We have it palpably in our mouths; it is our langue, our tongue. Writing it, we shape it with our hands.”
—Wendell Berry
“Fiction is an alchemical art, a way of knowing not only the worlds that exist today but hypothetical worlds, vanished pasts and imaginary futures. Why read or write fiction at all, if you don’t want to go beyond the mind you have?”
—Karen Russell
“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
—Hilton Als
“That one consciousness should meet another consciousness on the plane of written language is strange and extraordinary. It is as deeply human as anything that ever was, and sacred too, however you might define that word.”