It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

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.

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Cultivate balance. After all, there's no such thing as a shadow without the involvement of light.

I'm a big romantic, so I love guys who are romantic too.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

There's a lot of people I'd like to write with, like Keith Urban or even as far out as Stevie Wonder.

Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.

People don't hear me talk. They don't expect me to.

I have a great appreciation for our world's history. I learn from my own mistakes, I learn from the mistakes we've made as a human race.

An exclusive person hates ugliness, discomfort, enemies, sickness, poverty, ignorance. He finally concludes that there is no God and give himself over to abandonment.

It is an awful, an appalling thought, that we may be, this moment and every moment, in the presence of malignant spirits.