We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring to its knees like a traitor.

Young people think they know it all, but a lot of old salts around know they don't.

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

Can you imagine a silence so desperate to be heard?

Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.

Teach people to play new chess, right away. Why do you offer them a black and white television set, when there is a set in color?

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

Working with Jack [Nicholson] is sort of like standing in front of the Grand Canyon.

The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.

Any act can be a prayer, if done as well as we are able.

Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.

I'm kind of a distractible guy.

The Great Commission is the Great Adventure of Christianity.

Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.

That would have been a nice place, inside an idea, but it wasn't a place to live. It was necessary to live where the idea and the fact collided.