Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.

Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I've been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I've been pretty lucky.

My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.

As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.

I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.

I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory

I'm missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.

I grew up in New York, I love New York.

Cooking is about putting food on the table night after night, and there isn’t anything glamorous about it.

How sublime Upon a time-blanch’d cliff to muse, and, while The eagle glories in a sea of air, To mingle with the scene around! - Survey The sun-warm heaven.

Being fearless doesn't mean having an absence of fear. It means you press on in spite of fear.

Oh, I so don't care about the podium at the Oscars. I've stood at the podium at the Oscars and that's close enough. To be a presenter is as close as I need to be.

Nobody is gonna love you like you.

So now I'm rollin' down Rodeo wit a shotgun, These people ain't seen a brown skin man, Since their grandparents bought one