If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

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.

Sometimes, the simple things are more fun and meaningful than all the banquets in the world ...

While real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort

...“living in oneness with Buddha’s teaching, is a creative life in which everything becomes meaningful.

Religion is the opium of the people.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.

Well being as there's no other place around the place, I reckon this must be the place, I reckon.

What I do with the story itself varies of course, but what I want to do is to present the world so that the reader can access it without tripping over the details.

Hey!" I screamed, waving the jacket, running to one side of the monster. "Hey, stupid! Ground beef!

We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this world; there is none to waste.