If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.

Solitude with God is a place for pregnancy. Solitude is also a place to receive great ideas and creative ideas from God. The power of imagination is strongest in the place of solitude.

I don't understand why some things are talked about and others are not. I don't know why I think I can make any kind of difference. All I know is that I want to.

Hope you don't think this is Billy Joel unplugged. I'm a piano player. I'm already unplugged.

The principal cause of war is war itself.

I try to be as quiet as I can at the plate, but still aggressive.

When discussing complex systems like brains and other societies, it is easy to oversimplify: I call this Occam's lobotomy.

We are star dust in the highest exalted way, called by the universe, reaching out to the universe

Truthfully I wanna rhyme like common senseNext best thing I do a record with common sense

The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

The gray silence, the gray waves, the gray wastes of the sea.