All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Waiting insistently in front of a tightly closed door is unfair to all of the open doors! Give a chance to the open doors!

Mama's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes. Daddy's in the alley, he's looking for food.

In a machine age, dressmaking is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable.

It's only with that absolute humility and purity that you can make friends with God; because, otherwise, you're just too busy with all your desires.

Think about that. Two hundred and eighty-five new or expanded programs, $2 trillion more in new spending, and not one new bureaucrat to file out the forms or answer the phones?

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

The way everyone in London is right up against each other makes it very real to you growing up, the fact that people have different lives to you. And that causes problems; of course it does.

I'll no longer say that I have supernatural powers. I am an entertainer. I want to do a good show. My entire character has changed.