The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

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.

I had been able to break the curse myself. I'd had to have reason enough, love enough to do it, to find the will and the strength.

Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.

I am an ordinary person.

You have to take those concepts and prove them, a little bit like you do a PhD thesis.

The human spirit must transcend number and break through multiplicity, and God will break through him; and just as He

I regard myself as an entertainer much more than an artist.

I do have pleasure when I'm writing. I mean, I'm aware of pleasure. And sometimes I make myself laugh, with a joke or something; or I feel gleeful.

Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.