Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

That's the problem with life. You never get enough time to stare at your ceiling and try to figure out what's going on.

...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.

I was hanging out with some of what my mother would consider the wrong kind of kids. With no direction, no motivation. I would hang out in the lunchroom all day, or the handball courts

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

I often play on the cello-bass side of the orchestra, because I prefer the deep sounds. I can't hear the violins well.

To practice jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge and discrimination, it's necessary to have a highly developed mind.

It's called the pump, people - you got to experience it; it's one of the better highs in life, you don't need to shoot up for it, you don't need to snort it. All you got to do is sweat for it.

I don't believe in magic.

I'm not someone who's sort of still trying to figure out what I believe in.

Vietnamese must be made to feel that they are racial inferiors with no right to national identity.