I'm really suspicious of anybody who comes in and says, this is your identity now, or this is your belief system, and now that you have this, everything's going to be great.

I love the idea of biracial. I actually don't use the word biracial. I tend to use mixed. Biracial to me accentuates the word race, and, you know, I don't really care for it.

The sociopaths - that's the real problem. The whole street demeanor is about pretending to be a sociopath as well so that the real ones can't find you.

Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom.

It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one.

People aren't social. They're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are real.

For some reason, people always assign high cheekbones to some ethnicity, but apparently by their regards, everybody on earth has high cheekbones. So I don't know if that matters.

Everybody just gets on my nerves after like, 10 minutes, you know.

My weak suit is whatever each reader hates about each book.

My strong suit is that I've been willing to risk on the page to get somewhere interesting.

I've been writing forever, 20 years.

He went to hell and back, to shut the door of his past, he would not let that door be opened again by others.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

Just as with the man in the fairy tale who turned whatever he touched into gold, with me everything is turned into newspaper clamor.

The ideal is not believing in, but believing from.

You've already been at the bottom. Why don't you go for the top?

The cross was a glorious outworking of the grace of God, by which the Father commissioned the Son to make full satisfaction so that sinners might be saved with no sacrifice of God’s justice.

The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances.

One thing's for sure. If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting. One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.