I don't do it for Michael. I do it for them.""Them?""People.""They're broken! Flawed!""Yes, but some of them try to do better. Try to forgive.

There is only one religion - it is a way a man dies.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

The most important thing about writing a book is having book parties.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

When I was younger I wanted to be an airline pilot, but that lasted for about 30 seconds.

The officers of the branch of the Force (the Obscene Publications Squad) have a discouraging club tie, on which a book is depicted being cut in half by a larger pair of scissors.

Accept that there are things in this world we can never explain and life will be understandable. That is the irony of life. It is also the beauty of it.