I really try to forget. I only look at my old works if there's an interview and someone asks me about it. Otherwise, it's not even in the rearview mirror.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Better than a thousand sayings Made up of useless wordsIs one word of meaning Which calms you to hear it.

To believe that there are difficult or unreachable things, doesn't change the nature of those things, only our position towards them

The sea, the majestic sea, breaks everything, crushes everything, cleans everything, takes everything...from me

I used to be more paranoid and stressed, constantly worrying about my Plan B. But the truth is I don't have one.

Patriotism: The first resort of a scoundrel.

No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced

I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones' Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man.

Love is such a confusing word. You think I'm joking but I'm not.

Giving me a a new idea is like handing a cretin a gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang bang.

When you sign on to say, "Okay, yeah, let's develop this," usually that turns into, "Oh, he's doing it." But there's no script for some of these things.