My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.

We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.

Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

I don't think they'll ever make a retro Bond.

There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.

I let people off the hook too easily.

I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.

Every good leader is part manager and every good manager is part leader.

There's a lot of meth [in Bisbee]. So there's an ex-cop-car Tahoe and a BE DRUG FREE van parked right in front of my house.

The corals do not look much worn, but still appear to have been dead. There are some delicate shells of molluscs from depths beyond 500 fathoms, where they were certainly living.

The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.

In high school there were so many Jennifers, I had all sorts of names, including Jo-Jen, Jenna, Jenna-Bean, and Jenny A.

I didn't want to skate for someone else or for certain marks.

An original is a creation motivated by desire.