It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.

Make sure your sphere of influence is a piece of Heaven

Thinking is like exercise, it requires consistency and rigor. Like barbells in a weightlifting room, the classics force us to either put them down or exert our minds. They require us to think.

The art of losing isn't hard to master. I, ve done it

My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family.

I think in any country you have macro situations and micro ones.

People-to-people charity is more efficient, less costly, more human and compassionate, and more likely to inspire change and self-sufficiency in the beneficiary.

In chess it is more important to frustrate your opponent's strategy than to be obsessed with your own.

Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Like all good ruins, I look better by moonlight.