In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
A child's mind is its living room; it's is going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.
A child's mind is its living room; it's going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.
The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.
John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.
To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.
I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends.
When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.
The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.
A writer needs a life of introspection.
My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.
Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom.
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.
When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
