“You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.”

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.

To hear, one must be silent.

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.

Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

What is life without incompatible realities?

The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

We have a big appetite for putting people down but, at the heart of everyone, there’s enough room for all of us to succeed.

My momma didn’t clean up floors so I could be a thug… so I could wear my pants down.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

WWE asked me to be in the Hall of Fame, and I turned it down. You know why? They put Pete Rose in the wrestling Hall of Fame. This guy can’t even get into his own Hall of Fame.

If you get knocked down – setbacks in life, like applying for a job if they don’t hire you – keep trying, keep getting up, keep doing it.

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.