Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

Words have less substance than air. Don't tell me about your zealous dreams, your firm convictions, your profound love―show me.

I hope I never become so used to the world that it no longer seems wonderful.

Whatever my life looks like, I want it to be real and big and full. I want when, if I get hit by a car, I want to know that I have deep and real friendships, people to visit me in the hospital.

This is my favorite part about analytics: Taking boring flat data and bringing it to life through visualization.

My happiness is tied to how I feel about myself.

The time has come to recover the valiant courage of our forefathers, who understood that faith and freedom are inseparable, and that they are worth fighting for.

Cats be talkin', "Bobby I ain't feelin' ya." But I bet if I was peelin' your cap back with a two-shot Dillinger Hot lead released from my cylinder, You'd be talkin' 'bout, "Bobby I'm feelin' ya!"

Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?

Being here allows me to make the case that not all aging, narcissistic movie actors whose children could be mistaken for their grandchildren necessarily act with the same motivation.

The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.