Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to express our new consciousness until we have as many words for sexuality as the Eskimo has for snow, that pervasive, beautiful, and mortal climate in which we all live.

Knowledge is a collective enterprise. Without it understanding is impossible. Ignorance is too often a murderous vulnerability.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

This desert town was man's own miracle of pure purposelessness.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.