I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

I would have offered you a forest of truth, but you wish to speak of a single leaf

Live in such a way that when you die you leave God in your will for your children.

To be at peace with the world, you must first find peace in yourself.

We've got to have major health care reform because that is the 800-pound gorilla. That is the thing that can swamp the boat fiscally for the United States.

I think I'm like a free spirit.

Its almost Thanksgiving! A day when you get to hear your extended family use racial slurs for groups are not taking away their jobs.

A boxing contest is a brain-damage contest. Who can give out more brain damage and who can absorb more of it?

What's important now? - To evaluate the past, focus on the future, and tell you what you have to do in the present

A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

When enlightened people are so poor that they cannot help others, if they speak a word to awaken the confused or to resolve a problem, there is also boundless merit in that.