Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

If you have found a woman who can stir both body and spirit, sir, do not give her up lightly. Do not. The alternatives can be damnably complicated. [Joseph Warren]

I'm just a product of grace that's still in the process; And I don't got to be great because my God is.

As you get older, your mind gets a little more set. And it needs the poking and prodding and breaking through of stereotypes that I think young people provide.

I'm running my mouth a lot and I'm looking for a guy to shut me up. If you don't shut me up, I'm going to keep running my mouth.

John Green is a very handsome, intelligent, and wise man. He smells really weird though.

My Marine experience helped shape who I am now personally and professionally, and I am grateful for that on an almost daily basis.

The reality, or substance, of professional wrestling is the ability to perpetuate a fantasy. I never distinguished between fantasy and reality. I made my fantasy reality for over 60 years.

Doubt always hovers nearby, but I take photographs the way a musician hums. Looking is like breathing. So when luck turns my way and offers me a good picture, joy is surely nigh.

My remit has always been: I want to do something different from the last thing I've done.

Life will pay any price you ask of it.