“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.”

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.

If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

Length is usually intensity. Not time.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’ but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.

A screaming comes across the sky.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one’s enemy only when his back is turned?

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.

The reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.