How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

People are actually very good at being communists in the sense that they instantly abandon capitalism, that they love these relationships of mutual aid, because the astonishing thing about disasters is that people are often weirdly joyous in them, because they've recovered a sense of agency, a sense of power, etc.

The oil corporations spend a lot of money to get, say, the tar sands pipeline through, but nobody's - you know, there are definitely environmentalists being paid - but a lot of people are acting for something other than financial compensation. So if the tar sands pipeline doesn't get made, it's because a huge amount of people are doing something that doesn't involve remuneration, money, etc., because we're not actually the self-interested financial instruments that economists like to imagine we are.

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.