Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt...they work together.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.

When you remove yourself from what is no longer healthy for you, great things begin to surface.

Learn from the past, live in the present and create your future.

The goal of the human soul is conquest, perfection, security, superiority.

Never call an accountant a credit to his profession; a good accountant is a debit to his profession.

We shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next door neighbors should hear that freeborn citizens dare not speak in the open.

Don’t be discouraged by the size of your network – inspire one person and you are doing good.

She was seriously staring. Which was what you did when you got a gander at a man who is hung like a Louisville Slugger.

That a thing is peculiar; is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.

There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.