Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

I will write myself into well-being.

God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

I'm afraid of those cows, ' protested poor Dora, seeing a prospect of escape.'The very idea of your being scared of those cows, ' scoffed Davy. 'Why, they're both younger than you.

Dancing is a expression of desire, thoughts, and emotion in a distinctive way.

There is no substantive difference between being stabbed to death in the living beating heart with a physical knife and feeling the plunging stabbing pain of betrayal.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.

You rarely get a convincing lecture on playing to your strength from a bald guy with a ponytail.

I wish I had fair justification for not being as informed as I should be, but I don't.

It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone.

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.

I just want to keep playing music and keep recording. I feel like my best days are ahead.