I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.

She smiled, and her eyes started to drift downward. "Cather..." Back up to his eyes. "You know that I'm falling in love with you, right?

So, what if, instead of thinking about solving you whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.

In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can't Google.)

You're a kaleidoscope, you change every time I look away.

Drinking tequila is more about the journey than the destination

Every woman wants a man who'll fall in love with her soul as well as her body.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

You don’t have to be the kind of beautiful that everyone can agree on. If the right person finds you beautiful, you win. You win forever.

To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

The future is a possibility

I pushed my over-taxed muscles even harder. I could already hear the sound of the heavy wheels that moved the doors into place. And I knew I was not going to make it . . .

In the commercial real estate business, brokers spearhead major accounts. But they wouldn't have customers without the people who oversee construction.

In the ring, I never really knew fear.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I learned just by going around. I know all about Kleenex factories, and all sorts of things.

Every true work of art must express a distinct feeling.

My parents wondered what to do with this insufferable show-off. They chose acting for me and I'm very grateful I can still make a living from it.

We cannot let our respect for the FBI blind us from the fact the FBI has sometimes come up short of our expectations.

People can say you're fat because you're filling a void, or you eat for all these emotional reasons. I said, 'I don't need to focus on this anymore. It doesn't matter why I'm fat. Let's fix it.