The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion.

To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.

It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite.

we've produced a generation of spiritual panhandlers, begging for coins of wisdom, banging like bums on every closed door...if an old man moves into a shack or a cave and lets his beard grow, people will flock from miles around just to read his "no trespassing" sign

The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life.

First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life.