I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.

God pity the poor novelist.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.

Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.

We know nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

No one could ever meet death for his country without the hope of immortality.

There is no more futile punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

Even if I am being conservative, I don't see how Obama can lose.

The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body, and they express its materiality every bit as much as the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body

I’m not going to bed after all. Somebody around here hath murdered sleep. Good for him.

I made a mistake and I'll work in the season to be better. It's part of life to be a man and don't try to hide something if it's broken.

At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that's going to add something positive.

I think one of the reasons that I love the fans that have stuck around, because I really enjoy writing different kinds of songs. I don't know if I write them well or not, but I can write them.