To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

a dream is only a memory of the future

Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

I will live a joyful simple life, doing what I love.

if you can’t acquaint an opponent with reason, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk.

It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things.

A time will come when instead of shepherds feeding the sheep, the church will have clowns entertaining the goats

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.

Prayer is an end to isolation. It is living our daily life with someone; with him who alone can deliver us from solitude.

I love getting dressed up for red carpet events and having my hair and makeup done professionally - that definitely helps with nerves of going down the red carpet.

Two went to pray? Better to say one went to brag, the other to pray.

Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us

If the fruit is green it will not fall to the ground even if you beat it with a sharp stick. When it is ripe it falls of its own accord in the silence of the night.