A good editor is one of the sharpest tools a writer can have in her toolbox.

You can take my heart, but I can't let you take my dog.

Don't try to follow in my footsteps. Make your own footsteps! No one else can tell the stories that are inside of you except for you.

Keeping libraries open, giving access to all children to all books is vital to our nation's sovereignty.

I never felt isolated; I just liked being alone. I think that some people are good at being alone, and some people arent, and as a child, I really liked it.

Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

Everybody had something horrible happen to them at one time or another in their life.

[On men:] ... you never know what they're like until you get them home and take them out of their packages.

As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.

Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.

You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.

I have been fiercely private, in part because I could never understand how a journalist could be otherwise. I was also the mother of small children, and security concerns were paramount.

The fate of a nation depends on the way that they eat.

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.

We can never grasp the extent of our depravity until we recognize the excellencies of our created dignity

My spirit life is also the medium in which I live. It's not something that comes and goes. Without one the other wouldn't exist.

Even now, the irony that so non-intellectual a man should choose to engage the Soviet Union on the battlefield of ideas has eluded most commentators and historians.

Try to leave this world a little better than you found it and, when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best

The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the world.