Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

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.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

I walk the beach to smile at other peopleand their busy children, trying to findanother way to save the world.

I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

It has to be an awfully good meeting to beat having no meeting at all.

For three decades, Democrats and Republicans worked together to make our environment better.

I was an unusually private person - in a way, kind of insufferably so. I think I thought the celebrity thing when it happened was a temporary phenomenon, and I was above it.

Usually I bring very attractive women with me to excite interest. I mean, it's a type of, like, strangers-with-candy situation.

A dead end street is a good place to turn around.

I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.

So enjoy the pleasures of the hour as not to spoil those that are to follow.