I'm tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, "Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere."

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.

I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.

I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.

I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't.

Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.

This is what life is about: seeing new places, meeting new people, grabbing life by the balls and squeezing until it coughs up a story worth telling.

I am so stupid, so easily fooled. It's really almost funny. If I could lift a finger I would gladly kill myself.

I am conscious of the fact that the subject of hell is not a very pleasant one. It is very unpopular, controversial, and misunderstood . . .As a minister I must deal with it. I cannot ignore it.

My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone.

Esse quam videri," Celia says. "To be, rather than to seem.

I think I was the first to show that a designer could be like a rock star, that people should love your fashion but also put your name together with your fashion.

As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that's what I'm looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not.

If in the darkness of ignorance, you don’t recognize a person’s true nature, look to see whom he has chosen for his leader.

Don't be afraid. Human birth is full of suffering and one has to endure everything patiently, taking the Name of God. None, not even God in human form can escape the sufferings of the body and mind.

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.