I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

But my anger was a slippery thing, like a fish I was trying to keep hold of, and it wiggled out of my grasp.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

And you know, the baby boomers are getting older, and those off the rack clothes are just not fitting right any longer, and so, tailor-made suits are coming back into fashion.

You can't talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.

Either way, you are in charge. Jealousy works against you. It takes control away from you, hands it over to the opposition. Maintain control.

I have a vision of the whole Church getting nearer to God by abiding by the precepts of the Book of Mormon.

Survivors told me that sleep was a great escape from the nightmare that was Jonestown. I also longed for bedtime each night at Escuela Caribe; sleep allowed me to forget where I was for a few hours.

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.

Renunciation is submission to time.

There's always risk in life's most rewarding pursuits, isn't there?