I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

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.

Being anonymous on help, it's feel's awesome.

And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.

I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.

May love be your guide in every moment of your life.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

This is how we loosen up for the morning announcements. Whoever has the football when the bell rings loses.

The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.

We want to see ourselves reflected in our heroes. Unfortunately most of us don't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.