“Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.”

You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” And I said, “where can I put it down?

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.

There is no person without a world.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.

Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth– we call it life.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Have we not all, amid life’s petty strife

A bit of a crisis of faith, I suppose.

If you see me happy, laughing, or in love then please, don’t disturb me.

And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

The guardian of our heritage, the teacher of our teachers,

Riches, rightly used, breed delight.

The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.