A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.

If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

I have a blog in Chinese, which you can follow, Chinese signs. But I don't even update at all, often I don't.

The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life.

In 2003... the White House conspired with an oil-company funded think tank to block a major government scientific report that sought to spell out the dangers of climate change to Americans.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

here, there, and everywhere"-an opinionated riddle.

Writing fiction is an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.

The structure serves the people, people don't serve the structure