It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

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.

There aren’t any ‘relative’ (worldly) things that is worth inviting. So what is worth inviting? The ‘place’ where we have to go is worth knowing.

Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger.

Suffering is overated.

It's important that we work very closely with moderate Muslim forces locally, nationally and internationally.

Well of course New Zealand isn't anti-American.

The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.

It really expresses a man in pain.

The UN to some extent diffuses U.S. power. Therefore it's less direct an agency of the United States than the U.S. Army is. But still, it can't escape the distribution of power in the world.

Aphrodite: Pfft. That's not the point. Follow your heart. Percy: But... I don't know where it's going. My heart, I mean.

Snow has turned the world into a cemetery. But the world already was a cemetery and the snow has only come to announce it.