Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I’d have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.

Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.

Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies...

At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife’s barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, “It was enough to...

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the pain, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you’re...

What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a...

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way...

The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played....

It’s regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.