“I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.”

In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.

The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”

So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.

There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.

To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.

And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.

As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.

I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.

The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.

It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

I always did a lot of singing and dancing, so I am glad it worked out that way. I would like to study stage acting at some point, though.

There are some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They are blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

I think there are some players born to play ball.

I think there’s always some good reason to try and modernize most period things, because at the end of the day, they may have,

Each time I think Ive created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.