I never took the bus. Never. Walking meant you were eccentric or pious or a loser - riding the bus meant you were insane or masochistic and worse than a loser.

I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom.

Marriage wrecks any decent relationship.

The broken spine of the book shows the webbing of binder's string, and my fingers have worn white spots in the cover.

My father, born in Colorado, met my mother, born in Switzerland, when he went into the finance company where she worked and asked for a loan.

I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.

Your job is not to judge. Your job is not to figure out if someone deserves something. Your job is to lift the fallen, to restore the broken, and to heal the hurting.

When the lost doesn’t want to be found, he cannot be regarded as the lost!

Live intensely and dangerously. The world may not depend on your efforts, but you do.

The historian amputates reality.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.

If God made me a princess, why didn't he take a little more time and make my hair so it wouldn't snarl?

If I melt dry ice, can I swim without getting wet?

To him who has thought, or done, or suffered much, the level days of his childhood seem at an immeasureable distance, far off as the age of chivalry, or as the line of Sesostris.