We are surrounded by story.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomenon, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural... we should strive to fill those gaps of ignorance.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

I see the people in Detroit are very - they're like a lot of cities, but they're very proud to be from there and they really want to see change and they really want to see good things happen.

I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.

Is nothing in life ever straight and clear, the way children see it?

People change all the time whether you like it or not.

Who doesn't want to know that we notice them and value them? And who might respond to us better when they feel that they matter? It probably cannot be overstated - it matters...that people matter.

A spirit cannot soar with only one wing.