It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.

Out last chance is a cat's magic sight. We are doomed.

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

All religions are like different cars all moving in the same direction. People who don't see it have no light in their hearts.

I can access emotions very easily.

...perhaps there is some element of good even in the simple act of living, so long as the evils of existence do not preponderate too heavily.

The law of your mind is the law of belief. This means to believe in the way your mind works, to believe in belief itself.

True words seem false.

This is all very interesting, but Donald Trump won in an electoral landslide that had nothing to do with the Russians.

For many years, I hated nature. As a student, I refused to put a plant anywhere - a living plant, that is. Dead plants were OK.