If you take two steps towards God,' he used to tell me, 'God runs to you!

Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.

How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer.

We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?