There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

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.

Do not let the roles you play in life make you forget that you are human.

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

Do not allow the adumbrations of Aristotelian logic to prevent you from seeing a vast spectrum of truths

Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

One thing that somebody told me is that leadership is a lonely role - some people can do it, and some people can't.

My own singing voice is not very good and I don't think that anybody really sings in their own voice.

Dreams Matter because they push you

When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.

If, at the end of the day, we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes.