Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

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.

Beware of anything that would tarnish God's mirror in you. It is always something good stains it—good, but not best.

It's hard to be the first. It's almost as if I'm subject to a different level of inspection.

Sometimes when I watch a TV season, your favorite shows die quickly. And then sometimes it's not your favorite, and they live on for 12 years.

Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.

There are phony teachers who profess all kinds of things, and I think you will figure out real fast who they are. They just don't feel right.

The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses.

Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.

If we take back the labor unions, the legitimate businesses, eventually they become just another street gang. Spiritually, psychologically, they've always been just a street gang.

Find joy in the journey.

[The Lord] has indicated that the greatest work we parents can do is performed in our homes, and our homes can be heaven, particularly when our marriages are sealed in the house of God.