Woody Allen once said: "You know there must be intelligent life in space. The question is do they have good Chinese restaurants and do they deliver?" Which is really a joke, but it is also a very profound remark. When you say do they have good Chinese restaurants, what you're really saying is, "How much are they like us?" And when you say, "Do they deliver?" you're saying, "Can they get here?" Both of which are profound questions. And at the present, we have no answers.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

God is the nest we build together.

Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.