We are all both victims and victimizers. Just as everyone suffers, no one is innocent of causing suffering themselves.
Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.
At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?
We need more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.
Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.
The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude facts at your feet.
Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.
As a kid, I really wanted to have my own show. But when you grow up in poverty, people tell you nothing is possible. So I kind of gave up on that dream.
No honest man will argue on every side
I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.
We were brash young fellows. I was always hanging with the older crowd anyway. The musicians were the Hip Cats, and I was hanging with them anyway. I Just started out real early.