If being a spokesman for a generation is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it.

I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

Life is your sacred journey. You ought to enjoy every moment.

You're allowed to be sad and angry. You're not allowed to give up.

If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable.

When I worked in the White House for President Carter, we tried to do comprehensive tax reform and we made some progress, and other presidents have as well.

Look guys, if you're just going to stare at me, I'm going to bed!

Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.

Once you provide people with a platform to start their own country, every conceivable type of innovator reaches out to you with their own idea.

In the school of the spirit, man learns wisdom through humility.

I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.

One generation cannot bind another.