this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

You've just got to trust your instincts and realize that you can't please all the people all the time. You've got to please yourself ultimately in the end.

Patience is idling your motor when you feel like stripping a gear.

The [Barack] Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They're afraid of death by a thousand cuts - you know, leaks and things like that.

There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others.

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

The ability of people to reach their own news sources now, and create different views, is really unbelievable, and [populism] may be part of this.

Scientists should be doing a better job of guarding their own reputations and of the general scientific community.

It is quite unsettling looking into someone's eyes, especially when you aren't used to it.

People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.

It was dog food. Beef livers with onions in a can. You open it up and it looks like vomit.