Everyone performs bad actions. . . A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Time is how you spend your love.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Traditionally, I have no right to talk about race. I'm white; I didn't grow up in an all-black neighborhood. But the license I see for myself is I'm a member of the world.
In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.
A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.
The busy man has few idle visitors; to the boiling pot the flies come not.