I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary meaning for me behind the effort.

I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

To conform is to lose your soul

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

It is really irritating to work with irritating people

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

As the sun hides behind clouds, success hides behind trouble.

By honoring and responding to your natural and essential requirements for sleep, food, water and movement, you will rise out of the realm of survival into the world of fulfillment.

I meet people who are in movies, and the stuff that they write is terrible, but nobody tells them that because they're famous. So I worry that my stuff might be like that, too.

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

I devalued the peso solely looking after the poor.

Ernest [Hemmingway] was always ready to lend a helping hand to the one on the rung above him.

I lay my head on the wheel and the horn begins honking, the whole neighborhood knows that I'm home drunk again.

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

We have embraced the 21st century by entering such cutting-edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation and paint. Try to control your excitement.