But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.

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.

The only faithful tradition is change.

Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.

When your eyes go, and your legs go, and your fans go; then it's time for you to go too.

The political maturity of a country is measured by what citizens willingly do for themselves and one another.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

The southerner talks music.

The ability to lead a happy life is made, not found

There is always room for those who can be relied upon to delivery the goods when they say they will.

Righteous willin, the only thing supreme swimmin'.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.