It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.

You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.

I dont fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.

The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.

All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?

Bodily fluids and solids are universally the most disgusting things we as human beings can come upon, but as long as they are inside us, it's part of you.

Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger.

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.

My soul sees its equal in you.

When you read a line that is just so well-written you just close the book and stare at the wall for a minute.

a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime

I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

Love the sea? I dote upon it--from the beach.

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

When I was growing up, I lived in a neighborhood that was largely Latino and I thought I was Latino!

The only limit to your garden is at the boundaries of your imagination.