Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

Go for long walks, indulge in hot baths, Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, Just let go, Just be.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.

All great empires die from within.

The most irritating experience for an artist is to have his work criticized before it is finished.

The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

Open your arms to change but don't let go of your values.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

It is not science that has destroyed the world, despite all the gloomy forebodings of the earlier prophets. It is man who has destroyed man.

That kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight.

Freedom cannot exist alone.

I think that the history of the past hundred years has shown us that, by and large, the one linguistic group to whom separatism is being preached is not moved by the arguments which are used.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.