“Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.”

The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.

I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.

There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.

Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.

But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.

I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.

Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.

For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.

So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.

No one ever expects poetry to sell…

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.

I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.

The things you own end up owning you.

Grieve not; though the journey of life be bitter, and the end unseen, there is no road which does not lead to an end.

How Do I Listen to others? As if everyone were my Master Speaking to me His Cherished Last Words.

In the end, it’s not about failure, it’s about how much you love what you do.

Success isn’t about the end result; it’s about what you learn along the way.

What really counts are good endings, not flawed beginnings.

God, in His wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length.

We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life, which in the end we leave, only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness.