No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.

I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

Facts are lonely things.

Music is dangerous in so many ways. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.