The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

Indolence and stupidity are first cousins.

All memories fashioned at the level of a child's eye were unreliable in scale.

For me nightlife is like everyday life's mirror.

Wherever you observe persecution, there is more than a probability that truth lies on il the persecuted side.

The image gets built one way or another... it doesn't get done by following the natural order of things, but arises instead from an order that you have in your mind.

I have spent the last five months obsessively working on Outlaw.

This was the ethos of the intelligence analysis directorate during most of the 27 years I spent there.

It's always harder satirize what you like rather than what you dislike.

We cannot choose the times we live in. Just as, sometimes, we cannot choose whom we love.

You need a degree of foolishness to cause disruptive change in healthcare. Dare to dream.