People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Your worst putt will usually be as good as your best chip.

Everything you'll ever need to know is within you; the secrets of the universe are imprinted on the cells of your body.

Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.

Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.

You can't plan to write a great song. It just happens to you. It drops in your lap. It's the same thing with a woman.

Just a tender sense of my own process, that holds something of my connection with the divine.

I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same.

There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

A judge found it constitutionally intolerable that Louisiana should interject 'religious beliefs and moral judgments into teaching.'