This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.

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.

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He'd have loved it, all right.

I write box notes for Kino International, which specializes in distributing foreign films.

I have always grown from my problems and challenges, from the things that don't work out, that's when I've really learned.

The greatest work in all the world is the building of men and women of character. Without character there is not much that is worthwhile.

To write an article about someone and then to have that person murdered is disturbing.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.

In the house of God there is never ending festival; the angel choir makes eternal holiday; the presence of God's face gives joy that never fails.

The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.