I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.

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.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you'll have left is your character.

No local church can afford to go without the encouragement and nourishment that will come to it by sending away its best people.

My greatest fear is not your failure, but your success.

For so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man's good intentions toward his fellow man.

People have a hard time making me dress up to look like a classy gal.

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.

If u behave differently, u will be expelled from the tribe because u can infect others and destroy something that was extremely difficult to organize in the first place.

When I was ten, my pa told me never to talk to strangers. We haven't spoken since.

Since he saved me from the attack, I have associated his smell with safety, so as long as I focus on it, I feel safe now.