Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a culture of Kardashian.

A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that's interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get.

Theres a constant struggle going on about how much will be illegal and how much you will be free to take. Can we open the pharmacies? Can we put Valium and Percodan and those sorts of things out on the shelves? I wouldn't take it. I don't know.

It occured to her that pleasure, no matter how deep, was a ghostly, ephemeral thing. Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it ws the cries of the badly wounded andf deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of it's axis.

I do have one slightly crooked wheel upstairs, but everything else is ticking along just four-o, thank you very much.