I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.

It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.

If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.

I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?

The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.

Schools need not preach political doctrine to defend democracy. If they shape men capable of critical thought and trained in social attitudes, that is all that is necessary.

It's interesting to see how we are all uniquely different.

If we only save the finger of one man, that's enough.

California is choosing between the lesser of, uh, 300 evils.

I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.

No man will say, "There is no God" 'till he is so hardened in sin that it has become his interest that there should be none to call him to account.

There was a fence and there was this other van- So I go, 'Fence or van? Cause I'm crashing into one of them,' and I said 'Fence,' so I hit the fence and bounced into the van

There isn't a plant or a business on earth that couldn't stand a few improvements-and be better for them. Someone is going to think of them. Why not beat the other fellow to it?

Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.