“A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.”

One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.

My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.

While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.

A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.

Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.

A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.

In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.

No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.

When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it.

They make a desert and call it peace.

Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.

As our Father makes many a flower to bloom unseen in the lonely desert, [let us] do all that we can do, as under God’s eye, though no other eye ever take note of it.

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

Not everyone knows what to do when they come across a snowflake in the desert.

The deserts of the Middle East are in need of water, not bombers.