It would have been better if it had been raining because there’s just something about being a passenger in a cab when it’s raining. Very Wong Kar-Wai.

How Bush chose stupidity.

Can I use your car to run these forged checks to the bank? Uh, okay.

You gotta be willin’ to die with the motherfucker.
—Elvin Jones, on improvisation with Coltrane's Classic Quartet

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.

"(T)here is only shame and regret, resignation and anxiety."
—Clifford Odets

Goddamn, my eyes burn.

That was when, completely deadpan, I said, "I care not at all about children."

“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.'”