Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

You're into her. You're into the girl we came here to kill.

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.

Real talent is a mystery, and people who've got it, know it.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

I feel very lucky that I don't have to rely on a man to give me financial security. That's a big deal.

I only remember a few things about Jimmy Carter. He had big lips and liked peanuts. I now know that Jimmy Carter was and is a good man.

I almost never get recognised in the street.

It has always been a peculiarity of the human race that it keeps two sets of morals in stock-the private and the real, and the public and the artificial.

Because if the manifestations that happen in the present moment are beautiful and good, their continuation in the future will be also good and beautiful.

The Russians could not have had any impact whatsoever on voting in America, either how they were cast or how they were counted.