I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.

Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I've been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I've been pretty lucky.

My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.

As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.

I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.

It's not enough to open your eyes. You must open your heart as well.

It's elementary, my dear Winifred.

This is God's world, so everything, even if it intends to efface God, bears witness to God – understood and interpreted through biblical eyeglasses.

The crown of literature is poetry.

I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art.

We sit here on the oasis of human consciousness and the verbal plane trying to talk about something that we just have to go and see and do and feel.

There is no luck; you've got to make your luck. You've got to always be prepared-without trying to.

It's important to play the pieces that you feel you can play well. It was always my dream to play Bach - my first love and fascination - Chopin, and Szymanowski.

A man is a man, on a throne or in a pigsty.

There is no news media. There's simply a bunch of people on television and in newspapers who are ranking members of the Democrat Party.