What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

...you never knows where a spark may drop and a fire begin to run.

Superficial cannot discover the deep, because both live in different levels and likewise the deep cannot meet the deepest! Change your level to reach at different levels!

To work with the hands or brain, according to our requirements and our capacities, to do that which lies before us to do, is more honorable than rank and title.

If I get a chance to write a comic book or do a voice in an Adult Swim show, I do it. It's much more fulfilling to me and I get to work with people who I'm a fan of.

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Crime, after all, can be a way of establishing identity or acquiring security - at least the magistrate addresses you by name.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal while blaming our misery on the person who started the fire.

"God", "the immortality of the soul", "salvation", "the beyond"-even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them-maybe I was never childish enough for that?

The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life.

When you're a little weird, you aspire to be normal; when you're very weird, you aspire to be recognized for it.