So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.