If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.

A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.

I'm too young to have kids, but I really want to be a mom. I don't know if it's a Latin thing, but I love kids.

I had to choose: Either leave the country, where it's become dangerous for me, or go on the offensive.

What others regard as retreat from them or rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.

Don't thank the lord, I gave you that compliment... Thank me.

Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest.

D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Vision, even for a dragon, is woefully unreliable. What you can see with great clarity may not be real; what you cannot see may be the ultimate reality.