Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.

The living arrangements American now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually.

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.

Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.

The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.

At the heart of our misunderstanding and infantile behavior is the wish for a miracle cure.

My chains are broken. I am free in Christ.

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.

Success, for me, is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.

You see nature and then you try to emulate it.

[David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.

You don't find happiness, you make happiness.

Man Proposeth, God disposeth.

This use of advertising - to add a subjective value to the product - becomes increasingly important as the trends in our technology lead to competing products becoming more and more the same.

Vincent van Gogh's mother painted all of his best things. The famous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by Van Gogh's dealer.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.