No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

The Soul is attached to the world, and her Love contains the passion, beauty, and awe that make life worth living.

The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.

The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them.

The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.

Very few fighters get the consideration of racehorses, which are put out to pasture to grow old with dignity and comfort when they haven't got it anymore.

It's not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it's what you put into the practice.

You always have to prepare for the obstacles that are going to come. Consequently, when they do come, it doesn't affect you mentally near as much as when you're unprepared for them.

People do want to know the personal things. How far is too far to go with personal lives?

Love is an act of faith, not an exchange. Contradictions are what make love grow. Conflicts are what allow love to remain by our side.

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.