Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.