“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.”

“Paradise Lost is a poem. The old, blind bastard’s trying to sing to you. Listen, as the Isley Brothers say, to the music. You must learn to do that before you can expect to understand. Slowly. Slowly. A few licks at a time.”

“Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.”

“Looking at each other like, What the fuck's going on here? We big-time undercover supercops.”

“All Stories are True.”

“If you write about the present it is very much more difficult to make things sound convincing. But writing about the past means that you are writing about a situation in which you know at least as much as anyone else.”

“In every person of whatever station look not for things to criticize, but for something you adore in your Creator.”