The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct