Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.

I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.