Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

a dream is only a memory of the future

Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.

Not because I'm trying to be fabulous, but I love those big crazy Jackie O shades.

Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.

Yet there's something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.

The best players I've coached make really hard things look easy. Like you may say, well, that was easy, and then, well, go try it. You think it's so easy, go ahead and do it.

Resolved, never to suffer the least motions of anger to irrational beings.

A lot of people have asked me how short I am. Since my last divorce, I think I'm about $100,000 short.

I am looking for the human who admits his flaws Who shocks the adversary By being kinder not stronger What would that be like? We don't even know

I found out that the things that hurt us the most can become the fuel and the catalyst that propel us toward our destiny. It will either make you bitter or it will make you better.