Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze - no way out - it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.

Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.