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 universe does not have laws. It has habits. And habits can be broken.

To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.