I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

How I hate you, " he said softly. "If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.

There's someone in my head, but it's not me."Pink FloydDavid Eagleman

The real offence as she ultimately perceived was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his - attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.

For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality

I really am a smoothie person. I love making a morning smoothie and then will drink some coffee and will not eat at all before lunch.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

You have to be a pretty miserable person to not enjoy making movies. It's something I always dreamed about. I do not take it for granted.

I owe everything to the army.

Embody the three harmonies: within; with others; and with nature.

Knowing you might not make it... in that knowledge courage is born.