An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.