I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?

Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.

Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.

When I go train hopping and I look up into the sky, there are always so many more stars than I remember there were.

Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.

The instant people specialize, its in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

[Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.

At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

Where there is the slightest insistence, there is no religion there!

A call to duty, a call for service.

Visions are for the Heavens to see.

After every difficulty, ask yourself two questions: 'What did I do right?' and 'What would I do differently?

You always want your people to be proud of what you have accomplished.

Clay is so young and has been misled by the wrong people. He might as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan.

The outside world is what kept Buffy and Angel from being together.

Love is the law of life.

Only your friends steal your books.