My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

A flower is a plant's way of making love.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.