“I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.”

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

You see in others who you are.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.

No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.

Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something’s time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.

We wanted to make fun of that fear-based culture we’ve been plunged into. And Halloweens the perfect metaphor for fear.

Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.

The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.

Every time some new huckster of angst-ridden metaphor is appointed by Art Forum, the congregation genuflects, stroking the catalog like a handful of Rosary beads

To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.

To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.

The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.