I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.

The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREEcrunch.THE END

The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.

Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.

[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success

I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.

[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.

When flying dreams hit the soil of reality, all that remains are the imprints of experience.

The Southern Baptist Church is a specific culture in itself. So, I had to study, talk to people, watch tape and go to performances to see how Gospel artists move compared to secular artists.

Girls are more attractive to me than dresses.

Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

Habit is ten times nature.

I am a liberated teacher. A person who meditates with me, even though they may be thousands of miles away, will draw that light into them.

You are the devil to talk to, Rachel," he said curtly. "Will you shut up and listen?

I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.

I brought my lips down to hers, and it was like everything that had ever happened to me had simply been a warm-up for this moment, that this was where my life truly began.

Religion is removed from the public realm, and the public realm is removed from the affairs of religion. However, this is not neutrality. Implicitly, it supports secularism.