My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.

And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.

You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares.

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.

Everything did mean something.

At His door, what is the difference between Moslem and Christian, virtuous and guilty? At his door all are seekers and He the sought.

The ultimate goal of Bhakti is to get Krishna and we get it by taking shelter of the holy name.

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

Jazz is my comfort music, like comfort food.

There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

Energy deregulation will be the largest transfer of wealth in history.