An actual artist, living right under her nose.

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.

But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-

No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.

I've spent years living safely to secure a longer life, and look where that's gotten me. I'm at the finish line but I never ran the race.

A leap year Is never a good sheep year.

Rest of my life is more important to me than politics

I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit.

Presence of mind and courage in distress, Are more than arrives to procure success?

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

I just wanted to tell the story of a bunch of musicians who had never had their story told before. There's no preaching or theorizing.

Wisdom is a very relaxed state of being. Wisdom is not knowledge, not information; wisdom is your inner being awake, alert, watchful, witnessing, full of light.

Don't be a salary slave! If you are going to do anything in this world, you must start before you are forty, before your period of initiative has ended. Do it now!

There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.