Tangled in one another's arms and nine times out of ten the things you think about a person make it impossible to touch them.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

The past was so past it hurt.

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

Not everything that can be counted counts.Not everything that counts can be counted.

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?

Beauty isn’t between a size zero and a size eight, it is not a number at all. It is not physical.

I've been afraid every single day of my life, but I've gone ahead and done it anyway.

This is truth: When you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon as yet undrawn.

No matter what happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world.

When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other.

When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer, you beat cancer by how you live, why you live and in the manner in which you live.

This session of Congress is also to relieve the farmer again, relieve him of any encouragement that he might have received during the last one.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?