My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.

You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.

The library is every child's lighthouse. It is every person's sanctuary. It is every town and county's fortress in the face of ignorance, intrusion and bad behavior.

Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

Be real and unashamed. Even of your faults.

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.

You will be fine, ' the fortune teller says. 'There may be decisions to make and surprises in store. Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that.

If her artist's eye had given her nothing else, it taught her to see beauty where few others noticed it.

No state can match the beauty of the Chesapeake Bay, our beaches and farms, or the mountains of Western Maryland, the Port of Baltimore, or the historic charm of every corner of our state.

I would rather put up with Rush Limbaugh and live in a country where we all do have freedom of speech.

An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect of the organ of vision.

Chicago's such a great city because it's got so many different brilliantly architecturally looking buildings, and you can really modify that city.

The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace.

"Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza. "Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival."

Ramp skating has become the most popular televised form of skating because they can constrain it. They can judge it based on what's happening within this box of a ramp.

I was never much of a reader. I'm a slow reader, which is unusual, because I'm so into language and I love words so much. But it's hard for me to read.