It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

In terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone's mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people's lives, with real individuals.

I'm not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I'm going, what time I'll be back and then I gotta sign back in.

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything

So high is my Lord’s palace, my heart trembles to mount its stairs: yet I must not be shy, if I would enjoy His love.

All business proceeds on beliefs on judgements of probabilities and not on certainties.

If you're in a good profession it's hard to get bored because you're never finished-there will always be work you haven't done.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.

I don't know who Maxime thinks she's kidding. If Hagrid's half-giant, she definitely is. Big bones... the only thing that's got bigger bones than her is a dinosaur.

We'll always have bureaucracies, but bureaucracies led by bureaucrats might be too much of a bad thing.

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.