Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

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.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness

The most important things in life happen over conversations while eating.

Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.

Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?

The future belongs to the educated.

Is there a God? No. God is a verb, not a noun.

Marriage is two imperfect people committing themselves to a perfect institution, by making perfect vows from imperfect lips before a perfect God.