I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.

People who are employed in a way they don't like - my heart cries for them.

Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

[On the metaphysical:] ... I knew in some marvelous way I had touched the hem of the unknown. And being me, I wanted to lift that hemline a little bit more.

Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.

We're not going to have a perfect batting average and it's important that Americans understand that.

Everyday, say a hundred things you love about yourself.