This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

Let your face speak what's in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I'm glad to see them.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.