My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Under the seams runs the pain.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

If you hate others in the name of God, you should be looking within to see where it stopped being about God and where it started being about YOU.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

Children's bodies aren't like automobiles with the assailant's fingerprints lingering on the wheel. The world of sexual abuse is quintessentiall y secret. It is the perfect crime.

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record

I don't talk about success. I don't know what it is. Wait until I'm dead.

Moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force.

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

Bravery does not mean being fearless. It means to be full of fear but still not being dominated by it.

Against us are all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty We are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils.