“Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.”

“I don’t think you lose anything by hallucinating. It’s cheaper than airfare, the destinations more interesting, and I’d rather have a mutant squid on my window than the State Department trying to do foreign affairs.”

“Perhaps I had missed a great deal, reading so continually and seeing the world through the windowpanes of books. But then, maybe not. If books had made up a large part of the experience of my youth, it only meant that what I’d missed in immediacy of experience, I’d gained in variety, looking so widely into the thought…s and dreams of others, of travelers and sages, of soldiers and scholars and all the mighty dead.”

“Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.”

“I began to write again. I wrote just for the fuck of it.”

“I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted. You write of 'powerlessness.' Join the club, we are not in control. God is.”

“I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.”