Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Hip-hop don't have no fresh energy, none at all. It's money driven, everybody tryin' to make that cheque, nobody putting art in their albums any more.

It's hard to kill that father-son bond.

All beings wish for happiness, so extend your compassion to all.

I think we're all safer when the police respect the communities they're supposed to serve, and the communities respect the law.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

Small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray.

I'll sing as long as I can because I enjoy doing that. I enjoy the fans and what I do. I love the traveling and the hotels and just seeing the world over and over again.

You think defending this nation [americans] is expensive, try not defending it. That's a lot more expensive.

when we travel, most of us take too much. I always work on the assumption that I'm going to take everything with me because I don't want the second wife to have anything if the plane crashes.