If you want to know a country, read its writers.

All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.

Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

I don't need you by my side. But I want you there. Very much want you there. That, I think, saysmore. Means more."He took the hand she held out to him. "We'll go down. James should be here soon

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.

It's ridiculous that our solar system, not to mention the universe outside of that, is extraordinarily well organized, to the point where we can predict 70 years away when a comet is coming.

Thoughtfully assessing and addressing enterprise risk and placing a high value on corporate transparency can protect the one thing we cannot afford to lose: trust.

Career success is using your daily work, schoolwork, work in the world, work at home, as a way of advancing your mental state.

Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.

But I also made it clear to him [Vladimir Putin] that it's important to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe.

Of all the rewards of virtue, . . . the most splendid is fame, for it is fame alone that can offer us the memory of posterity.

The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.

Sometimes things are better off forgotten.