Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction.

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been

Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.

Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience.

How much you can love others without expectations will define who you are.

He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.

I've gone through the village of my songwriting and my artistry, and I've gone through lots of different phases, including one where it has been very quiet and abandoned me for a few years.

We would have never gotten mace had someone not thought, There must be a good way to burn someone's eyes.

There is more to us than we know. If we can be made to see it, perhaps for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less.

I spent as much time writing proposals in '98 and '99 as I did writing scripts.

That's the thing I loved about drag queens, life was a constant movie; no matter how ridiculously things didn't match they would sacrifice everything for the pose, and I was definitely into the pose.

It is bad advice that cannot be changed.

When they say "Be yourself," which self do they mean?