“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.”

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.

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.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Under the seams runs the pain.

Habits eat good intentions for breakfast.

They ignore what is deep and true to a man’s heart, his real passions, and simply try to shape him up through various forms of pressure.

Whatever’s happening today, remember it is only ONE SCENE in a long movie. Don’t treat it like it’s the whole story. Keep writing the story.

What is reality? The answer Jesus gives to this question is: God and his kingdom. That is what you can count on and what you have to come to terms with.

But I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

Every male secretly wants sex with Brad Pitt.

Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.

Life feels less lonely, and that’s a big obstacle to overcome.