My perception of the human animal is as an extremely dangerous predator. That's who I perceive us to be as a species. Maybe the most dangerous predator on the planet, with the exception of a few microbes. I'm really grateful for the degree of socialization that prevents us, most of the time, from killing and eating each other. And I admire all the social structures that have been designed and layered and niched in that encourage bonding toward a kind of social harmony that is meant to contain and counteract our natural inclinations toward predation, ferocity, and eating whatever moves.

I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.

Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. At times like that the only way out is for me to decide, 'To hell with it. I can't do it right, so I'll do it wrong. I can't do it well, but I can do it badly.' Sometimes, with luck, while I'm sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.

Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass.

This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.