It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

Learn to thank God for the things you want but cannot have. Matthew 6:25-34.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.

Tibet's a tragedy. It's an insult to human decency.

It's important to understand that violent Islam is only one face of violent religion.

Apple might not love me, but I love Apple.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

I was the little white kid who rocked the turntables

America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.