Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.

I wake up in the morning and I lie in bed, and it's the time I call "the theater of morning." All these thoughts run around in my head, between my ears when I'm waking up. It's not a dream state, but it's not completely awake either. So all these metaphors run around and then I pick one and I get out of bed and I do it. I'm very lucky.

I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

I take this continent with me into the grave.