My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

To conform is to lose your soul

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

It is really irritating to work with irritating people

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary meaning for me behind the effort.

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

[W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.

The author describes Lincoln's attitude in making a deal with a newspaper publisher as, "almost defiant transparency.

Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.

You have a couple of buddies sleep over, and, you know, you play cops and robbers. That I'm getting paid to do it now is kind of funny.

Write as well as you can and finish what you start.

My friend Kurt Maix once described this diffidence as Fear's friendly sister, the right and necessary counterweight to that courage that urges men skyward, and protects them from self-destruction.

First of all; Frank was the BOSS. We didn't question any of his motives or decisions at the time.

All I have is this guitar, these chords and the truth.

I respect newspapers but the reality is that magazine "photojournalism" is finished. They want illustrations, Photoshopped pictures of movie stars.

An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.