You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

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

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.