I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feelings save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.