In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.

The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.

I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.

In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white, every last one is pretty pink on the inside and they are all impossible.