Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.” Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.

A woman can lend a man the strength to conquer a kingdom, and bring him to his knees with one breath.

When it comes to writing, clarity trumps all rules.

The City is free of sinThe snow has given it absolution A man who slips A horse that fallsOh no, the city is in a nightgown

America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.

I try to be a man of mystery. I try to keep the various projects I'm up to as close to the vest as possible until it's time to reveal them.

When people (talk trash) about you, you have to keep it moving, keep the records hot and keep your head up.

The emphasis is on meditation in Tantric Zen. The experience of meditation in formal practice, zazen, where you're sitting down and meditating and concentrating.

If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.

Nobody remembers who was the richest toga salesman in Rome.

The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.