The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.

I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years.

If dogs talked, one of them would be president by now. Everybody likes dogs.

Dogs are one of those things that make you happy and make you wonder.

Love was a sacred garment, woven of a fabric so thin that it could not be seen, yet so strong that even mighty death could not tear it, a garment that could not be frayed by use, that brought warmth into what would otherwise be an intolerable, cold world- but at times love could also be as heavy as chain mail. Bearing the burden of love, on those occasions when it was a solemn weight, made it more precious when, in better times, it caught the wind in sleeves like wings, and lifted you.

Loving the ideal more than the reality is the cause of all the misery the human species creates for itself.