Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

Dress the part! Invent and pretend to your heart’s content! Act, sing, and dance while everyone’s watching! The world’s a stage, remember?

The surge in right-wing populism and the phenomenon of Trump are related. You can think of them together as the same problem.

Death is what makes life fun.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy on me.

I'm only waiting for my wife to grow up.

Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.

All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn.

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is.

Monastic brotherhood, upon rock Aerial.

One of the 12 steps is to admit that you're powerless, but I think that's bullshit. I think it's important to empower yourself by facing the stuff that triggers you.