Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning, the love you get is the love that sets.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Women should be treated as human beings, not as domestic animals.

One of the things I think you need to be a good emcee is silliness. And I'm basically a silly guy.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Man is free; but not unless he believes he is[.]

Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river.

When I hear the word culture - I release the safety-catch of my Browning.

I know how demanding the process of creation is.

Fame! it is the flower of a day, that dies when the next sun rises.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

The greatest flood has the soonest ebb; the sorest tempest the most sudden calm; the hottest love the coldest end; and from the deepest desire oftentimes ensues the deadliest hate.