A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.

Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.