Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's not necessarily their rap.

There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

In a lot of ways, being a writer is a lousy job - grueling, emotionally taxing, terrible hours, no health care - so if it wasn't about love, what would be the point?

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.

I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years!

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re doing it wrong. Learn from the experience. Try again, but with a different approach.

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal.

Plenty poisoned minds of the people are ours. Slaves, from mental death.

If I had a Volkswagon Beetle. I'd paint the front to resemble Glenn Langdon in War Of The Colossal Beast. Why? Two words: The Ladies.

People think they can take a pill and become a champion. But the harder you work, the luckier you get. You have to work a move hundreds or thousands of times.

He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.

Realize that little things lead to bigger things.

I like to get that roll and pitch. I really like to take the car out on the highway for a spin.

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.