God, I miss Seattle.

To my ears, "ultramontane" sounds like the title of the next Morrissey CD.

"I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the power to do so at a later time."

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good.

I had always suspected that the Taiwanese were down with Fresno poetry, but now I know for sure.

Where were the doctors and nurses at Abu Ghraib, Qaim, Bagram, and the other islands of the United States prison archipelago abroad when prisoners were being beaten, suspended, and degraded?

How Bush chose stupidity.

You're not deluded about life if you grow up working in the fields.

I was also going to spend two weeks in a brutal, bloody knife fight with my unfinished novel. Either I was going to kill it, or it was going to kill me. Either way, it’d be over.

“This place is very dramatic and uncompromising and vast,” the Pulitzer Prize winner said. “When you sit down to write, you think: 'I want to write large to measure up to this.'”