I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

Success always hugs you in private, but failure slaps you in the public...

Consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and involuntarily, willfully and unsuspectingly, our beliefs are the sum total of our lives. It's that simple.

Casting all your care upon Him for he careth for you.

Let the ground of all thy religious actions be obedience; examine not why it is commanded, but observe it because it is commanded. True obedience neither procrastinates nor questions.

I vowed I wouldn't get married until someone gave me one good reason to. No one ever did - but I got married anyway.

This is NOT a pretty good business. You cannot be pretty good and be a national headliner. That becomes the allure.

I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

I'm not an athlete; I'm a quarterback. I don't have great speed, and I can't throw 90 yards down the field. I win games because I've done the mental preparation.

The only reason Christ submitted himself to the horrendous experience of bearing the sins of the entire world is because his death provided the only way for reconciliation with God.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.