I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Words at night were feral things.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

One writes to find words' meanings.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

I'm enjoying 40. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care.

I see the rodeo's in town again.

My method is to find a word with a gesture.

He who laughs.....lasts.

Fate finds for every man; his share of misery.

To get Congress to do anything.

I suppose if I were younger, I would be investing in Africa.

Charisma is the intangible that makes people want to follow you, to be around you, to be influenced by you.

I tend to think things are love and then look back and reevaluate.

You can't be everything. Nobody is everything. You just do what you do, and you try to do that as well as you can. And if somebody doesn't like it, too bad.