I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

A dark night, lightened up by thousands of glowing fireflies... It's magical...

Party is organized opinion.

I never go jogging, it makes me spill my martini.

Treat a person as they are, they will remain so. Treat a person the way that person can be and is capable of being and that person will become as he or she can be and should be.

Usually, the team that turns the ball over less will hold on to the ball more

Part of me believes that the completed record is the final measure of a pop musician's accomplishment, just as the completed film is the final measure of a film artist's accomplishments.

It requires as much reflection and wisdom to know what is not to be put into a sermon, as what is.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

You can't just be a recipient of a blessing, you have to do something to make it happen.