When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

A tree dances for the wind not because it enjoys it, but because it doesn’t want to break.

I paint the darkness and the silence, You see them as stars and poetry.

Another breath, left to translate

When I gave up a grand slam to Pete LaCock, I knew it was time to quit.

I know so many people think my music is quite influenced by Animal Collective, but honestly I think maybe the factor is that we're both influenced by the same stuff.

I hope they're still making women like my momma. She always told me to do the right thing. She always told me to have pride in myself; she said a good name is better than money.

Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?

In matters concerning religion, I consider myself not a child but an adult with 35 years of experience.

More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work.

My daughter loves singing above all else.