Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.

What I know is nothing but that we are a spring path of autumn light carved into a river of ancient singing.

Looking aroundthere is nothing but illusionEverything is drownedin the oceans of illusion

I wake up every morning and I surprise myself. I wake up to a new me.

When somebody promises to do something, you have to think about whether that's something that you would be willing to see happen because the powers are simply too vast.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.

For 25 years, I did take my responsibilities as a pleaser of others sufficiently seriously.

It really helps if you've got something like cycling, walking, running or swimming that can let your body release all that tension and keep your muscles fit.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.