I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?

Detroit: Cars and rock 'n' roll. Not a bad combo.

I was taught a lot of Bible at home and had a voracious appetite for reading the Bible.

Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office.

It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

I believe that government is for the use of the people, and not the people for the use of the government.

I have a tendency to be lucky and make the right choices based on limited information.

I reached a situation in which I cannot conduct the presidency.

Emotional labor is available to all of us, but it is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage.