Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

Most death now happens in hospitals. It's been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that's a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

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

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

A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.