When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

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.

I had a dream about you. You were lost in a daydream, when I walked in and you began screaming. But I know that could never actually happen. In real life I only enter people’s nightmares.

After all I've seen, if I hadn't learned compassion, I wouldn't be worth much.

... He was only a person on the outside and... his insides were ashes mixed with coins and a brain.

Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements.

The great man is sparing in words but prodigal in deeds.

I am brave, though I am alone.

We are all missionary disciples

Objection is when I say: this doesn't suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what doesn't suit me never happens again.