Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.

I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.

I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.

Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.

It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.

My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.

It’s the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.

I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she’s tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.

...space flight still had a long way to go to catch up with the safety record of the milkshake industry.

Hard things are valuable; easy things are not so valuable. Reaching the mountaintop is rewarding because it is hard. If it was easy, everybody would do it.

I don't talk to everybody, so they don't really know the real me. I don't think anybody will.

To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.

I'm growing old, I delight in the past.

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.

I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities.

I am the one who got myself fat, who did all the eating. So I had to take full responsibility for it.

When you're young and everything dramatic is exciting, you start to believe that hype that, in order to be an artist, you have to suffer. I've graduated from that school.

We, the comics that we like, we're all, like, post-humor.