No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.

It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.

You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.

Without stories, we are incomplete.

Books are really places, make no mistake about that.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

No man is a hero to his own wife no woman is a wife to her own hero.

Apple is our mentor, Facebook is our enemy.

It's so easy to get caught up in doing and achieving that we often neglect to make time to be with the people we care about most.

The publisher is a middleman, he calls the tune to which the whole rest of the trade dances; and he does so because he pays the piper.

When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.

You know when transformation happens? Right now. It’s a present activity. Who is the new you? Show me the new you.

In matters of the heart it is always better to want something you don't have than to have something you don't want.

Being a warrior is not about the act of fighting, it's about being so prepared to face a challenge and believing so strongly in a cause that you are fighting for that you refuse to quit.

What we need is a strong defense, but right now there is zero chance of an invasion by another country and right now we have more firepower than all other countries put together.