“All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.”

A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.

Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.

A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.

In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.

No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.

Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.

That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.

That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.

And they didn’t spend years painting your soul into masterpiece-like existence for you to waste it on someone who doesn’t appreciate you.

My darling, he is just a boy. How can he possibly begin to appreciate the constellations you leave in your wake, or the stardust in your bones, when he has yet to realize just what it means to be in love with a girl like you?

And the appreciation of fans can refuel your spiritual tank in those situations. But until you’re famous, people don’t realize how difficult that is.

Prayer and encouraging words change things. We’re all human. We all go through stuff.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I’m a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.

Gratitude is the appreciation of what is, of life, of existence, of anybody and anything, for just the way it is.

What will carry us into living freedom is not the holding of attention so much as the holding of appreciation.