I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years!

There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's not necessarily their rap.

In a lot of ways, being a writer is a lousy job - grueling, emotionally taxing, terrible hours, no health care - so if it wasn't about love, what would be the point?

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.

You have to let go before you can reach.

Whether the darken'd room to muse invite, Or whiten'd wall provoke the skew'r to write; In durance, exile, Bedlam, or the Mint, Like Lee or Budgel I will rhyme and print.

Trust is the conduit for influence; it's the medium through which ideas travel.

I've always known I wanted to be an actor. It never crossed my mind to be anything else. I think I probably decided for sure when I saw 'Sounder'.

After 9/11, we realized that all these silly culture wars, and arguing about rock lyrics... who cares? You know, we, for some reason, remembered what our real problems are.

Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.

I was on Khodorkovsky's payroll myself for ten years. I'm biased because I respect him.

"As the crow flies" - a popular and picturesque expression to denote a straight line.