There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being

It is my mood which decides the weather, it is my mood which brings the tiny changes to humankind.

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Politics is a matter of leading other people. Admittedly not where they want to go, but where they ought to go.

I love you to insanity. I'm not even sure if it's a good thing.'' — Duke

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

I am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it.

Actually, I wanted to be an actor when I was two years old.

I'm always working in this universe - whether picturing hamburger joints, Virgin Marys, domestic scenes - using these "vacant-faced" women as a medium to question universal truths.

We're going to be on the ground in Iraq as soldiers and citizens for years. We're going to be running a colony almost.