I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.

Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself and listen to it.

There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds.

I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.

It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this

I had a good-talking candle last night in my bedroom. I was very tired but I wanted somebody to be with me, so I lit a candle and listened to its comfortable voice of light until I was asleep.

I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.

Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

A celebrity is well known for being well known. I'm relatively well known - but for what I've written and said, or so I fondly imagine.

Nothing we can't handle, break it up and dismantle.

God's men are better than the devil's men, and they ought to act as though they thought they were.

My marriage had been impulsive. That marriage should have been short-lived instead of the 23 years it spanned.

Villains are often attractive.

We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

Keep your mind too open, and you never know what might walk in.