After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

The world is always in movement.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

Books are like our children. They are often conceived by inspiration, but are born only by labor.

I'm being uprooted, " Dino said. "You're being transplanted, " Viv replied, "and to a better home.

I was a puzzle. An enigma. I was nothing. And then I was again.

It's not about finding Mr Right, or that sort of conventional ending, but I do want my characters to have hope - and that's what I do with all my stories.

When it's a pop song, I don't really want to do pop songs, but they exist and sort of come out by accident.

Mary had Joseph. Esther had Mordecai. Ruth had Boaz. We will not become the women God intends us to be without the guidance, counsel, wisdom, strength, and love of good men in our lives.

If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms. Do me a favor and shoot me.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

Do what you did in the beginning of a relationship and there won't be an end.

It is the basic evasion of the essential which is the problem of man.