You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.

On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out.

Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.

I can hardly keep track of the things I don't know, but every now and then comes an ignorance that makes me nostalgic.

I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world.

Sometimes to take two steps in a row, one after the other, I need to make a contract with myself.

A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up.

Everything is fair and possible in love, war, and politics.

I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.

It is the public that is illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and environmental advocacy groups that manufacture fear for misconceptions about energy.

In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.

If you're really on top, you probably didn't do that great, 'cause you have to water it down a bit for it to get that mass appeal

It's awfully easy to be in love in jail

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

We can't win a war, but we can win an election.

Infantile people complain and say that God is cruel or that there is no God. Mature people, however, know that there is wisdom and sometimes an eternal kindness in God's refusals.