We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

Anger makes people stupid.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.

Lost in time but now I am saved by grace.

Entitlement is such a cancer, because it is void of gratitude.

Sometimes, when someone lives in danger for too long, the only time they feel alive is when death's breathing on their shoulder.

Real intelligence must be fiercely capable of investigating every aspect of existence, including the very process of knowledge that we call science .

Sweat your prayers, dance your pain, and move on.

People remember stories much better than they remember a straight list of teachings.

Once again, I arrived at my usual conclusion: one must educate oneself.

Torture takes over someone's nervous system. Torture takes over what they feel. Torture takes over and penetrates into their mind and into their body. It's not only illegal, it's immoral.

Unfortunately, my army consists of one unreliable criminal, one girl with a disability, and one incredibly foolish young vampire with a tanning issue. I am not confident.

India absorbs things; India's not a divisive place.