Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

Bears find themselves at the spot where two deep-seated but contradictory human impulses collide: the desire to feel protected from unforeseeable danger and the longing for unspoiled nature.

People are moving into modes of participation and self-generation, which apply to everything from museums and television to architecture.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.

We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance.

To grow up is to accept vulnerability. To be alive is to be vulnerable.

On Dec. 10, 2000, I learned I was free of cancer.

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.

We have the Troops to Teachers program, which encourages retired military individuals to go into teaching.