Childhood is a branch of cartography.

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.

Life has no guarantees, but my life has no meaning if you're not in it.

I wrapped a towel around me and I opened the door, and then I splish, splash, I jumped back in the bath. Well, how was I to know there was a party going on?

Heaven to me is percussion and bass, a screaming guitar and a burbling Hammond B-3 organ. It's a soup I love being immersed in.

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.

Also, if you want to reach people, theatre is not always the best way to do it.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.

Take too much pleasure in good things, you'll feel The shock of adverse fortune makes you reel.

You're talent, and we're the talent scouts.

I often think it's comical How Nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!