I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

False judges are held up in the world’s admiration and I alone know the true ones.

In the pursuit of acquiring Treasures, we lose the ONE treasure that we truly possess—Life. Let us not lose Life in the wild pursuit of other things.

He was mad and plenty brave.

Teachers are not glorified babysitters with summers off. Their profession fuels all others, and on a normal day that is amazing enough in and of itself.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.

Be ready to hit; get good pitches to hit.

I miss riding those fast trains in Japan... 'cause I'd never seen a train that fast in my life.

Oh, the naive Obama State Department. They say we can't kill our way out of war. Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can't. They're dead. We killed 'em.

You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you've heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.