I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.
I’m not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief.
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves – our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
We do not know how we’d behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.
There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
I exist in two places, here and where you are.
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
War is what happens when language fails.
I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
A word after a word after a word is power.
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.
My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.