“First sentences are doors to worlds.”

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?

The first songs I learned was ‘Crazy’ by Patsy Cline and ‘At Last’ by Etta James. I had been growing up with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, great bands.

The star [Tycho’s supernova] was at first like Venus and Jupiter, giving pleasing effects; but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a period of wars, seditions, captivity and death of princes, and destruction of cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air, pestilence, and venomous snakes.

I played my best everyday. You never know when someone may be seeing you play for the first time.

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

I remember being about six years old, for the first day of school, and sitting in the back of a Chrysler, pretending to cry while listening to Tracy Chapman.

If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.