The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor...

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized.

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

We all owe death a life.

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of...

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while...

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never...

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its...

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.