Follow your heart. It rarely leads you astray. It's thinking that gets us into trouble.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

If all my friends jumped off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them. I'd be at the bottom, hoping to catch them.

It's the circumstances that create fear. How you respond is all you can control. Concentrate on that, and you'll always succeed.

Say it, do it, preach it, shout it, but never, absolutely never, believe your own bullshit.

He that endureth to the end, shall be saved.

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS

If what you know and what you love are the same thing, that's great. But if not, write what you love. I love history, secrets, conspiracies, action, adventure, international settings.

The people can be forced to fear, but not to love.

It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

You have two eyes, but the discerning have three.You have two ears, but the wise have four.You have two hands, but the enlightened have five.

There are people in many other states who are cheering us.

Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to sleep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.

i could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. how could skin be that thin? i was so afraid you might drop and break. i stopped breathing so you wouldn't.

I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought.

Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable.

I don't feel like taking pictures with anyone [or] doing anything. I just like chillin'.

I got a mother who's very strong after taking the whippings that she took from my father.

The Earth is just one place of many that we could hang our hats.

I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.