I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

when words make noise, silence can talk.

Because you are in the middle of becoming who you will be. It isn't going to be easy. You may need help. So feel free to ask us for it.

My heroes, my dreams, and my future lay in Yankee Stadium. And they can't take that away from me.

When the public loses faith in democracy's ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game's almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.

I want to see Bob Dylan do sketch comedy. I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan.

Most of life's battles are won or lost in the mind.

You never know how your work is going to be received.

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power

It is a pity we do not die when our lives are finished.

An hereditary aristocracy... will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.