a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

When you plant the seeds, wait patiently to see the ripen fruits.

San Francisco lags behind other communities in providing a vital, vibrant and ecologically sustainable urban canopy, as well as open space in the city.

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.

There are places on a man's head that are as hard as a rock. Your head's actually stronger than your body. And you don't have too many instruments up there workin'.

To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.

People are so quick to judge and make decisions for themselves about situations they know absolutely nothing about.

It's not easy being so frightened of everything. And when I think of how much I've improved in the last year, I wonder when I'll ever get finished with making changes and be really grown up.

Greatness is not how you feel, it's how you make others feel.

The standards have sunk so low throughout our culture that who really knows.

We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.