How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Romance is good, you know

Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.

The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. When visiting the U.S. from Germany for a winter academic stay.

What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.

I was encouraged to read aloud in class and vocalize.

But not all scars showed, did they?

Where princes are concerned, a man who is able to do good is as dangerous and almost as criminal as a man who intends to do evil.

The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty privation and want are the school of the good soldier.

If we have the audacity to ask, God has the ability to perform.