His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him laughing equanimity even in hard times.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.

People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.

I think authors can get into trouble viewing the subject matter as their turf

It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Without dignity, identity is erased.

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled...and I just wanted to keep being filled.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

With no sense of smell, your memories dropped like pennies out of a ripped pocket, until the past was ashes and your parents were blanks: nothing more than the holes in Swiss cheese.

Your calling connects with your passion.

There are a lot of other parts on this team that do great things to make it easy for me to go out there.

I've always considered myself a character actor. That's the way I was trained, really.

If we do not want to die together in war, we must learn to live together in peace.

Sometimes they do things to make me do the opposite of what they think, I think, they think, I am going to do.

Office politics are bloody-minded, but weak on content.

There's always opportunity in the now. If I'm there, I will seize it.

The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world.