Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.

We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.