“Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.”

“I think he writes the truth. Because life is like that most of the time in some shape or form, whether it’s illness or the end of the world. Cormac’s a writer’s writer. You read his writing and think, I can do that, and then you sit down and try. And you try, dude.”

“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.”

“I have a habit to be reborn as a writer. So if I find myself in a crisis that I have never experienced, I can be born, or I can write something, by the power of the habit. Even a soldier or a farmer or a fisherman can be reborn by the power of the habit when he meets the greatest crisis of his life.”

“We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.”

“All we can do is live every single day and do our best to be present with the ones that we love and with everybody that we come in contact with … The timing of everything seems too divine sometimes to ignore.”

“But chance runs like a river through all our lives, and being prepared for surprise is the best we can do.”

“Bob Dylan: The media is all-pervasive. What can a writer think of to write that you don't see every day in a newspaper or on television?
Interviewer: …Do you think that TV and the media have killed poetry and literature?
Bob Dylan: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. … What's a writer to do if every idea is exposed in the media before he can get to it or let it evolve? What's a writer gonna write about? … We're living in a science-fiction world. We're living in a world that Disney has conquered. Disney's science fiction. Theme parks, trendy streets, it's all science fiction. So I would say, if a writer has got something to say, he'll have to do it in that–
Interviewer: Outside of the real world?
Bob Dylan: There is a real world. Science fiction has become the real world. Whether we realize it or not, it has.”

“When you think that the ground of consciousness is the most complex thing we know of, then it's not so unsophisticated to assume that the most complex thing that there might be is like that. Or at least that's as good as we can do with our imaginations. I don't think that's unsophisticated.”

“Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want respect for every man — who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?”