“You run risks. That’s the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny’s whims.”

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

I’ll tell you, my friends: it’s all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

One should read Borges more.

If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.

For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.

Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.

If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

Every hundred feet the world changes.

We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

I’d obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

Even as a kid, I wore J.C. Penney plain-pocket jeans because they were plain pockets.

I’m a plain soap kind of guy.

Mud can make you prisoner and the plains can make you dry.

Plain as a pike-staff.

I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

All the things I thought I was – simple and plain and sometime funny – are very small words.

When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains