Nothing has happened to me out of the closet that was anywhere near as dangerous as being closeted.

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

But the past is long, and the future is short.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

There is a major difference between a scuba diver and a drowning man. One is in control of his experiences, the other is in over his head.

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.

Two packed houses. I guess the theater sat 2,700 people every night so it was an amazing experience.

The world is grand, awfully big and astonishingly beautiful, frequently thrilling.

It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.

The human face does not always reflect the beauty that may repose in the soul.

Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.

It's not everyday you get to do a pirate movie, you might as well go for it.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.