I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.

We all need people to tell us that we were the ones who had been deeply wronged.

Our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even to procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time.

My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way.

It's all a big old chain. There isn't one unconnected link.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.

In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one's burial site.

Give it all you can.

Words got the power to hurt or heal.

In detective stories . . . I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but . . . there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild.

Whatever you want that others in your life can't give you, ask yourself how you can give it to yourself.

...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down.

You can consider this carved in stone: I rule out becoming Herman Van Rompuy's successor.

The man who reads only for improvement is beyond the hope of much improvement before he begins.

I don't see no black and white couples in England or America walking around proud holding their children and going out.

Show me the man who would go to heaven alone if he could, and in that man I will show you one who will never be admitted into heaven.

No emotions are bad. But if they stay for long, then it is bad. Emotions should be like a line drawn on the surface of water.