Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

In terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone's mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people's lives, with real individuals.

I'm not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I'm going, what time I'll be back and then I gotta sign back in.

It's a blindness thing, faith.

We are born different to make a difference.

I'm a really huge fan of the old romantic comedies from the '30s and '40s... Huge fan. I love all that stuff.

You're a prisoner of your own illusions - about yourself and about the world.

One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.

The reason men don't know the law of life is because they're afraid to look Eternity in the face.

I think hard-working people have more opportunities no matter what on YouTube, regardless of gender.

Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.

Jazz changes and all. But I don't know the names of what it is I'm doing.

Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face! I had rather lie in the woolen.