What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

I read books to read myself.

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Bonobos are... ambassadors from a primordial world of peace through pleasure, inviting us in one kiss at a time.

If you know that something is true and just, and you give up, thats when you fail.

By luck I mean, when opportunity meets preparation.

People are always nice; I never get anything mean said to me on the street.

If god is truly god, he is perfect, lacking nothing.

The person who is in tune with the Universe becomes like a radio receiver, through which the voice of the Universe is transmitted.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I'm animated.

A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, providing there are not too many.

I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.