Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member--if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Life is too precious and short to dare to waste it on mediocre dreams.

Instead of allowing a situation to alter your attitude negatively. Let your positive attitude alter the situation.

I have great respect for you - once you are dead, and gone

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.

Apparently vodka helps flowers last longer when they're dying. But you can put vodka in anything and it'll make it better.

How can you laugh when your mother's hungry? How can you smile when the reasons for smiling are wrong?

I came over here and worked for rock magazines, and I worked for Rolling Stone, which has a very high standard of journalism, a very good research department.

I rarely dislike people for things they can't change, they usually give me sufficient cause to dislike them for other reasons.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions , from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.