Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.