A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?