To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Under the seams runs the pain.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".

When energy prices go up, the difficulty of projecting demand also goes up - uncertainty goes up.

Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

I'm a big champion of people doing things outside the system.

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.

The United States is the only country with a known birthday.

It's more important to get along with people than to get ahead of them.

I continuously strive to touch lives.

Successful people ask questions. They seek new teachers. They're always learning.

Don't forget your own self while preaching to others.