Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work—and each other. You’re my friend? Don’t pick up that pen!

Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it’s plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It’s written for writing’s sake, as if I were to say, “Let me tell you I’m dying.” Well of course I am. So are you.

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.

We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

What's the point of being an Australian guy traveling through India if you are going to go to India to meet other Australians?

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.

Israel has the best engineers in the world... I view Israel as a tremendous source of technologies

For the Earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds.

I am my own sanctuary and I can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.

much of gardening is a struggle against the fecundity of Nature.

When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.