I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Love is the intoxication of God.

Make sure you live, ' she said. 'As decent as you can. I know you'll make mistakes, but sometimes you're meant to, okay?

It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

The brain is a commodity used to fertilize ideas.

Say what you want about America - thirteen bucks can still get you a hell of a lot of mice!

I want you to be yourself, but not with other dudes.

Ring tones are just irritating, aren't they?

I always try to do true endings and that's where I got into trouble always because Hollywood wants to do happy endings.

The only person who can really motivate you is you.

It is not human nature to enjoy what we get with no effort.