The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

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.

My mind is like clay, but thank goodness God knows how to mold it!

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.

I think that ethical behaviour is another feature of the kind of inner discipline that leads to a happier existence.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.

A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.

Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.

I'm usually pretty happy. I don't ever really get disturbed in any way, or feel like I need to go back and change something.

If we can't keep our Palestinian neighbors and Muslim neighbors alive with good water and fresh air, we'll never get them to the peace table.

We may live without friends; we may live without books But civilized men cannot live without cooks.