There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

The female characters in my books tend to be independent, frisky, spunky, witty, emotionally strong, erotically daring, spiritually oriented and intellectually generous; in short, the kind of women I admire in real life.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.

At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.

To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry; to the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its music; to the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace.