“The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It’s not that I’m not interested-it’s not where I live. I live inside the story.”

The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

People think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back then, you know, it’s all – you’re all settled, you know? You’re going to be fine. I know that if I’m not confused, and really afraid, my work isn’t going to be any good.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

I look at the Senior Al Gore that I had the chance to serve in the Senate with. A great human being. He went down to defeat to this right wing bunch back at the time.

We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

I think that she looks great. I think that as Jennifer Aniston gets older, she looks better and better, and I really like that.

The first thing people look at with Four Seasons records is the vocals. But for me, the drum fills and rhythms are as much a part of it as anything. They’re the base on which the harmonies were built.

When you’re doing stand-up, you achieve an intimacy with the audience you can’t get on TV. There’s not a better feeling in the entire world then when you look out and see the audience is identifying with you.

Sometimes you go up to people who look totally normal and then you talk to them for a few seconds and you are like, Oh I better get out of this, because this person is a little mentally unbalanced, and they are not going to get a joke.

Look, I debate for a living so I don’t need to learn any lessons from amateurs.

If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.