No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.

...to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you've ever had.

We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?

When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.

If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.

When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any different between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.

Desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy - a claustrophobia inside your skin -.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

If you read the novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really

My greatest ambition is to have a career without becoming a career woman.

Grace is the understanding that God is a better savior than you are a sinner.

I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

I act according to the requirements of the character, and if I try to play the role, then I play it truthfully. In my daily life, I'm a laid-back, peaceful guy. I'm just doing my job to act.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

If you're going to come at me, come at me respectfully, and I will respond respectfully.

It's written into the Constitution that you're allowed to pursue happiness. In England it would be considered a frivolous objective.

Never look at the trombones, you'll just encourage them.