Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer.

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.

A first grader should understand that her or his culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society...Cultural relativity is defensible, attractive. It's a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed