If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.

One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.

Your birth is existence breathing out. Your life is the conversation with a message. Your death is existence breathing in.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.

Like a garden that is carefully tended, the rewards are well worth the effort.

I'm a Gibson guy. I play anything from Hummingbirds to J200s.

I detest the endgame. A well-played game should be practically decided in the middlegame.

The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

I went to a freak show and they let me in for nothing.

Marriage fills the Earth, virginity Heaven.

It's like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific.