One of the curious effects of a bad hangover is that you think you’re wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything.
The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.
We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.
Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.
I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.
I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed the aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.
We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.
Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.
I don’t see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.
The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.
My advice is, do not try to inhabit another’s soul. You have your own.
The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.
What cannot be said, will get wept.
All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.
Zen is the vehicle of reality.
I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.
You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it.
The days are stacked against what we think we are.
That’s my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.