My sister Tiffany told me years ago, 'You can never write about me.' Then she called six months ago and said she wanted to be in a story. She was worried people thought I didn't like her.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

I don't like to look for anything in particular.

I cannot explain something that no one has ever figured out.

What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.

People are born to be free; it's a gift from God.

In literature as in life, to conform to anything is to knuckle under to your inferiors.

Which is more remarkable fact about America: that millionaires are idealists or idealists become millionaires.

Happiness is the cessation of suffering. Well-being.

Our Constitution recognises no other power than that of persuasion, for enforcing religious observances.