I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

It wasn't the wild animals that scared her, but the civilised ones.

God gives us always strength enough and sense enough for everything He wants us to do.

We will never forget the passengers of Flight 93, who courageously confronted the terrorists, defeating another planned attack on America. They are the heroes for our times.

There is a sunrise or a sunset from space every 92 minutes so there is an incredible amount of beauty to see from up there.

You learn by trying and failing. Just a lot of hard work and mistakes.

When you're dealing with an in-law violation, I think the first line of defense is for the blood relation to have a serious talk.

I'm a little older and I'm gonna do a bunch more movies and then they're gonna put me in a home for old directors.

I still believe in the Holy Trinity, except now it's Target, Trader Joe's, and IKEA.

Everyone who got where he is started where he was.

My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.