Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

Anger makes people stupid.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.

It's not how old you are, it's how you are old.

Fashion has a reason to be, because in fashion you can find new kinds of expression about human beings. It's my way to communicate.

The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid.

Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.

Smile your best smile at everyone you see. Think about all the things you have to be thankful for... and smile. The world will smile with you.

I lived in a town of 400 until I was like nine or ten. My dad coached all the sports - he was a gym teacher and health teacher for grades K-12

Book cover, 'Reefer Club' Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.

I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot.

I grew up going to museums. I was privileged to discover art and artists in a very personal way.