I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Things are not what they seem.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

We cannot see the best things in life, we can only feel them. A poet tries to describe those indescribable feelings in a language of emotions and inner perceptions.

It’s odd to see how no one is really human to us until we talk to them and realize there’s barely any separation between who we are and who they are.

No matter how fleeting Your smile is, Your smile is the very beginningOf your wisdom-light.

I am a dead man alive.

When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.

When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs.

No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

It was really hard to find people to come over and play guitar and sing and write songs together. So that turned me into a songwriter that way, just so I could be able to play with other people.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.