I don't think I'd call [mood] a major force, but it is important as far as hitting the right notes or nuances with a character or scene.

Some people were born just so they could be buried.

If a person does this for just a couple of years and discovers that it just isn't for him, that's okay. At least he can move on knowing that he gave it his best shot.

Look, girls don't care how many push-ups you can do. They just want to get high and wear flowers in their hair. Maybe steal a car.

The Oxys filled holes in me I hadn't realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed.

I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.

Though there are still many good people out there in the world, it seems that they're vastly outnumbered by the stupid, selfish, violent ones.

I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory.

A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there's something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom.

When I turned fifty, I decided to quit the mill and go to graduate school.

I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.

...for everytime I see the sky I'm aware of belonging to the universe than to just one corner of the earth.

Philosophers have a long tradition of marrying stupid women, from Socrates on. They think it clever.

The thing women have got to learn is that nobody gives you power. You just take it.

We in the West seem to have made a fetish out of complete individual self-sufficiency, of not needing help, of being completely private except in a very few selected relationships.

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.

What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live.

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

Surely there never was so evil a thing as money, which maketh cities into ruinous heaps, and banisheth men from their houses, and turneth their thoughts from good unto evil.

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.