People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.

I never liked the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.

She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.