All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Healing the hurt is much harder than not hurting them at all.

The crowd makes the ballgame.

What else does anxiety about the future bring you but sorrow upon sorrow?

I want to make something that's fun to listen to but still challenging and unique.

I think most writers' houses are disappointing. What's much more atmospheric and interesting are the places they wrote about.

I hate wearing trousers and shoes. I wear jeans and sneakers most of the time.

Thoughts are not subject to duty.

think about the way God rules. He doesn't do it by sending in the tanks. He does it by calling servants.

Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence.

The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.