“There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky.”

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Everything truly important is washable.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

Rock Band never got anybody a date. Never.

I don’t really remember a whole lot of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, really.

Videos destroyed the vitality of rock and roll. Before that, music said, “Listen to me.” Now it says, “Look at me.”

Dinosaur fossils were placed in rocks by prankster God just to make human beings think the world is older than it is.

There’s a difference between music that’s original and music that’s retro. A lot of bands now are kind of retro 70s whether it’s Kraut-rock or… I’ve heard people suggest that we’re kind of retro 80s.

Rock and roll is catching on all over . . . France . . . England . . . They even have it in Japan, only over there they call it judo.

Rock isn’t art, it’s the way ordinary people talk.

I’m mostly a jazz fan and I’ve never really been into rock ‘n’ roll music.