“Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That’s a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.”

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don’t feel good all the time. There’s a lot of down, a lot of misery.

I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it’s just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don’t like the wispy and the vague… or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I’m impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I’ve done have come to me by instinct.

My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.

I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It’s a myth. There’s so much bad gun stuff.

You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.

Literature is the history of the soul.

Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.

There was no one, when I was in school, who talked about going in and blowing up students. The teachers were very stern and hateable, but nobody ever mentioned murder.

At this moment, our instincts are very impure. When we have practiced for a long time, living the higher values of life and following the instructions of great masters or the Scriptures.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

I like to think that the Grand Prix helped Long Beach to pretty much change its image.

The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it.

It’s a fact of life that there will be oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provisions to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of the oil shipments.

When you leave the house, it isn’t safe. The air you breathe isn’t going to be safe, not for very long. That’s why you have to enjoy the moment.

Long Beach is the best. I tell everyone that.

So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.