“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.”

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

Desire is no light thing.

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.

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.

Every dollar that I spend, every dollar that I make.

All of the actors that have served to me as inspiration over the years have been those more associated with dramatic work who have,

If you are wise, be wise; keep what goods the gods provide you.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Of what use were wings to a man fast bound in chains of iron?

And as an artist I feel an ardent urge to constantly be creating.

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us.

Everything eaten is killed. Every meal is a sacrifice.