When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

There's always a tone that you have to hit right in horror. With the blood, you want to make sure that it makes sense all along.

I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowereth over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.

A servant of God has but one Master. It ill becomes the servant to seek to be rich, and great, and honored in that world where his Lord was poor, and mean, and despised.

I don't think it's the role of the prime minister to court the press.

I admire anyone with their own sense of personal style.

Let's just start and see what happens.

Only a fool walks into the future backwards.