The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.

The first thunderstorm of the season was in the dressing room, donning its black robes and its necklace of hailstones, strapping on its electrical sword.

When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come.

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

The pervasive brutality in current fiction - the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord - is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world.

In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.

In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.