It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new...

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere...

A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins.

one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn’t let...

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is...

Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world’s value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Thus with continued concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness...

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates’ name. And that is because Socrates’ ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are.

Satire’s nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his...

Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this...

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.