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

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. … We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

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.

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.

A violent scene is art, as much as a sex scene is art. For me, all the scenes were a challenge.

There can be no centre in infinity.

As I see it every day you do one of two things

We must not, in opening our schools to everyone

We all make mistakes, but the people who thrive from their mistakes are the successful ones.

I’ve done a lot of independent film, which are short shoots that are usually four to six weeks, max.

The relationship of the toastmaster to speaker should be the same as that of the fan to the fan dancer.

Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.