I don't believe in a perfect world. I don't believe it's achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.

poetry is where the language is renewed.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions; do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.