"I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody..." — Robert M. Pirsig

People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.