What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.

If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.