I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.

No one has the right to force his or her way of life on anyone else.

Remember if God had wanted this to be perfect he never would have had me up here.

I have a great legacy, tarnished somewhat by the move.

I ran [for presidency] because I knew what trouble our country was in.

I think that there are many different ways of getting and staying sober. Like religion, I just don't think that one way is the only way.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

One guy can't create a field, but you can get people thinking.

To become a photographer leave your house first.

It is my duty to be a father to my kids.