Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.

To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.

If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

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 writer needs a life of introspection.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know.

I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic.

I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe.

I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.

I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.

I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.

I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'

I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends.

I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.

In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.

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.

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?'

Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom.

One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires.

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.

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who've been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.

The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.

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.

Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.