When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Dare to travel on your defined path.

I'm thinking about the cat dying, Dulcie and her knife against my throat, Mrs Irvin and her St Thomas bone... But never my sister. A brother rarely thinks about his sister.

Trying to make the presidency work these days is like trying to sew buttons on a custard pie.

Our number one opponents are not Liverpool, Arsenal or Manchester United. It is ourselves at Chelsea.

You don't have the right to be left alone with that abortion decision. The child is present...you are not alone.

If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person - you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.

Life without dreams is like a rainbow without colours.

You know, Neil Young is singing Rock n' roll will never die, and Neil never rocked and rolled in his life. I mean, he rocked, but he didn't roll. He has got no swing in him.

You own a piece of me," he murmurs as he holds me afterward. "Good," I tell him. "And just so you know… I'm never giving it back.

The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.