Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone..

Hasidism has a tradition that one of man's purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by "hallowing" the things of creation. By a tremendous….

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been..

Write about winter in the summer..

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence..

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time..

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain..

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living..

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and….

When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you….

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their….

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen..

Write as if you are dying..

I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed w….

People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took..

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of ….

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone..

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them..

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live..

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle..