The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

If you’re going to be an artist, you’ve got to make your work your best friend, that you can go to whatever you’re feeling, and have a conversation with it.

Life itself is the best (and the only) timekeeper.

The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.

If you love your work, if you enjoy it, you're already a success.

We have to find compromises. That's the way it is in Norway.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Life, when fully lived under a variety of cultural conditions, can be euphoric and optimistic; it can be a joy to experience and a wonder to behold.

In most states, it's more difficult to get a license for your dog than it is to buy a big cat. Right now, there are more tigers in the state of Texas than in all of India.

How much salt water thrown away in waste/ To season love, that of it doth not taste.