Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.

Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?

Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.

When I go train hopping and I look up into the sky, there are always so many more stars than I remember there were.

Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.

The instant people specialize, its in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

[Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.

At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

The overarching narrative of the Bible is that of humanity searching for home.

Charlie Christians' contributions to the electric guitar are as big as Thomas Edisons' contributions to the world.

Jesus Christ, being 2000 years old and some change, is a relatively "new" god of the older god category - and has done quite well for himself, in terms of worship.

East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual.

Whatever you focus on, you become. That is the key line, you know. Meditation is the bow and concentration is the arrow.

In a democracy sovereignity is vested in a majority; and a majority is not only, at best, an ignorant, foolish and emotional mob, but shifts continually and alters from year to year.

Manners form the great charm of women.

To insist that I am not forgiven is a kind of inverse arrogance.

People think that atheists have nothing to live for, but that's not true - it's that we have nothing to die for.

And when I get bored, it's like the worst parts of me come out. I really veer to self-destructive tendencies quickly.