“When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.”

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” And I said, “where can I put it down?

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.

There is no person without a world.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.

Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth– we call it life.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.

If only Jesus’ followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

Envy bestrides praise.

All the while, believe me, I prayed our night would last twice as long.

One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave.

Jesus associated with the outcasts; he spoke with them, touched them, ate with them, loved them.

Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness.

Words have a longer life than deeds.