My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.

Red is the first color of spring. It's the real color of rebirth. Of beginning.

If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his [mankind's] ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

A lot of people who wanted to audition for Idol have asked me: “What should I do?” or “How to I prepare myself?” I always told them: “Just go in and believe in yourself.”

gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them.

The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.

A lot of times, in music especially, it's producers making a political decision.

You just never know when movies are going to take off or not. The lucky thing about this was that it didn't cost a lot of money, and therefore there wasn't loads of pressure on me.