At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation possibly becoming a permanent condition.

Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

I look back on some of my early reviews of others, and realize to my chagrin that I've been as guilty as anybody else on that front.

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.

We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.

The most remarkable thing about suffering is that God can use it for our good.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

Our goal is not to completely eradicate the infection - that would be very difficult - but to produce a vaccine that will prevent not infection but disease. I think this is more possible.

People don't truly respond to something until they see the direct consequences.

There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, So just give me a happy middle And a very happy start.

Stress is when you wake up screaming and realize you haven't fallen asleep yet

A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.

How is it that the clouds still hang on you?