He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen.
This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.
It was something like the word ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is night’. What that ‘it’ referred to Quinn had never known.
I cannot say who I will be tomorrow. Each day is new, and each day I am born again. I see hope everywhere, even in the dark, and when I die, I will perhaps become God.
It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.
People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.
Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.
We are all aliens to ourselves.
For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition.
There’s an imp inside me, and if I don’t let him out to make some mischief now and then, the world just gets too damned dull. I hate feeling grumpy and bored. I’m an enthusiast, and the more dangerous my life becomes, the happier I am.
Our hearts know what is in them, even if our mouths remain silent. And the world will know what it is, even when nothing remains in our hearts.
If you look into someone’s face long enough, eventually you’re going to feel that you’re looking at yourself.
Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination.
The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.
I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.