Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.

It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.

The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Time flies when you're falling down"...(not from a book, it's a lyric)

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

Christian perfection consists in three things: praying heroically, working heroically, and suffering heroically.

It is partly the absence of recorded history which sends women now to the lives of women past for the detailed documentation of their daily lives.

Storytelling is the game. It's what we all do.

Military missions are not democratic development aid.

People who just listen to music and are not a part of the creative community should realize that there is a lot of interaction between artists who have different styles.

Some people say I have issues. I say those people need to expand their horizons because I don't have issues, I have the Library of Congress

By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man -- man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.

At Cisco, I made every decision based on what was good for the company, and that pretty much ruined my marriage and my health.