Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.

What thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.

I was a very, very old child. Sometimes you meet a child who seems more like an adult. I think I was that type of child because I had a nearly fatal kidney disease when I was 9 years old.

You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.

I don't remember being a child, and that's why I think I'm so child-like now in my unending curiosity and approach to life.

I think what you can’t see is always what you should be frightened of.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.

I take the world very personally. I take history personally; I want to place myself in the larger context.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

When faced with a difficult situation, do not panic but pray!

Hair is gray and the firers are burning. So many dreams on the shelf. You say I wanted you to be proud of me. I always wanted that myself.

Negativity feeds on itself, thereby compounding the potentially undesirable outcomes.

It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.

What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.

Fear is the foundation of all human limitations.

I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

Everyone becomes brave when he observes one who despairs.

our dreams draw blood from old sores.