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.

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

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.

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.

I'm in a hole because at some point I found a shovel and started digging. Maybe I should trade my shovels for ladders and start climbing.

In Buddhism we would say that you are lazy... Despising yourself, thinking you are no good, saying 'I can't do this.' This is the mind of weakness. You must work to overcome it .

But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn’t help feeling, was a very worrying thing for the world to do.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

Only through sheer ambition did I end up playing on [Bob Dylan sessions] and the fact that I could do that is a testament to how disorganized it really was.

As long as I know my head's in the right place, my feet are on the ground, I think I'll be fine.

I was in the pilot for Spinal Tap before it was a movie.

The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.

You may not realize this, but people have the power to change the world.