We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory changes as a person matures.

I rely on a backbone of books and, for the most part, it's enough to keep me quiet, half-drugged with dreams of imaginary worlds.

Latin is already a dead language, man... don't make it any deader.

The civilized man is technologically ahead of — intellectually behind — his time.

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

You don't build a bond without being present.

And in the end, I think, we're all just trying to survive, aren't we?

In my experience—and I admit I didn't anticipate this—most blacks are delighted to have a 100-percent honest conversation with a white man about race.

After a great game or a great practice, man, I feel on top of the world.

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility.

To keep it simple, why did God choose me? Because He felt like it!