Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.