We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us… We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.