If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

If you play with dirt, no matter if you win or lose, either way you will get dirty.

The hot desert to be their home, evil is their air.

How we respond to the opportunities and challenges of the outside world now determines how much the outside world values us.

Even now one rarely hears of people achieving great things unless they first stumble in some respect.

NY is the city it is today in part because of the contributions from generations of artistic visionaries

Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.

History is the heritage and patrimony of mankind in its lessons of the past that give priceless inspiration for the future.

I like to sing. I write music. Country songs. You have to if you're in Nashville. It's part of the lease. You sign a lease that says, I will write country songs and pay my rent on time.

Don't just cope, walk in victory.

Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.