Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Nakao: Koizumi, I'm so sorry I said such cruel things.Otani: What's that?Nakao: The whispering of your heart.

The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

Women move through the world never knowing their power.

If all is happening perfectly then all that we are feeling is also perfect, which means if there is something happening that feels like it needs to be changed, then change it.

Often, I visualize a quicker, like almost a ghost runner, ahead of me with a quicker stride.

Light, air, sound. In every space, it's how you embrace those things.

President Obama contends that charges he is "not really an American" have been trumped up by you-know-who.

Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.

The theater community at large, I have to say, has just been so warm and so welcoming, and that's not something I'm as used to.

I'd like to imagine that "dreamoir" becomes a subgenre of nonfiction, maybe ultimately because I'd love to read many more dreamoirs by other writers - poets and memoirists especially.