Just because you're living in blissful oblivion doesn't mean you're not responsible.

The only thing that matters is what you do now, here.

Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker.

People who are intolerant, categorize and over-react... should all be dragged against a wall and shot.

It’s always hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time.

You can't make cheese from rats. ... It's hard enough just milking the little beggars.

Don't cook that chicken - it still has feathers.

Spending the day with you has been marginally better than watching mother die of cancer.

I adore [my son]. I wouldn't trade him in for a Pulitzer - unless someone actually offered that as an option.

I thought I would try my hand at sailing. It was too small and kept sinking, so I decided to try a boat instead.

Every battle, every war - is fought for things worth dying for.

It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.

It's very important, once you are a parent, that you educate your kid day by day.

I think living to be one hundred would be great, but living to fifty twice would be so much better.

Gifts are free, but maturity is expensive.

I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house.

What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.

I want to stay in Hawaii a little while. I'm kind of liking it over there.

We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.

but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.