Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.

I firmly believe every book was meant to be written.

I'd rather be a born-once hog than a born-again Christian any day.

That’s the way we see life: your community is your survival. And if you live in a small community like this, even the people you hate you have as friends.

If I can be writing, I can take a certain amount of control when so much around me is upsetting.

I feel at times that I'm making up these little people and I've lost my mind.

I've never signed a contract, so never have a deadline. A deadline's an unnerving thing. I just finish a book, and if the publisher doesn't like it, that's his privilege.

If it ran, a Bean would shoot it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it.

If it ran, a Bean would eat it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it.

If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?

When I was very young I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. Believe me never since have I wasted any more time on tobacco.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.

[A]n Obama presidency would be an amusing approximation of the Carter administration, complete with vaporous moralizing and foreign policy bungling.

I am Bourbon as a matter of honour, royalist according to reason and conviction, and republican by taste and character.

To speak, therefore, of an electric current in the nerves, is to use quite as symbolic an expression as if we compared the action of the nervous principle with light or magnetism.

Presidential ambition is a disease that can only be cured by embalming fluid.

I'm quite neurotic, usually. But when it comes to work, I become extremely focused.

Every day, I love what I do and I think it's a gift and privilege to love your job.