As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.

I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.

I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

I'm the author of my own misery.

I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Without curiosity a writer is dead.

Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.

[On Rachmaninoff:] He was the most Russian of them all, like a cathedral in the snow. Holy, wintry, infinite, he was all the Russias.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

Dawn seemed to follow midnight with indecent haste.

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

Racism is kinda old. For real.

The hardest thing about being a communist is trying to predict the past.

I like music of almost any kind - including this.

Keep God in your heart like you keep money in the bank.

All hoods make not monks.