I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.