Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and out of that wanting - well, everything else rises, good and bad. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.