When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.

It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!

So much better to travel than to arrive.

You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.