Once you've found something you know how to do, it makes you feel you don't have to be intimidated by someone.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people.

I try to become more humble and more myself with every year. There was a while when I got famous where I was so confused and my head was spinning.

I assume that if people get to know me, they'll like me. If they don't, it's not my problem.

My major in college was Chinese Studies. It was very intentional.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it.

I want my life to effect the balance to the positive.

The Oscars have become such a big deal these days that it's just used as adjective.

When I was 5, my mother threw a party, and a friend and I wrote and performed a play called The Dutch Doll.

We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.

Picture this," said Magnus. "Me with a little monkey friend. I could teach him tricks. I could dress him in a cunning jacket. He could look just like me! But more monkey-shaped.

Or perhaps this hostility of yours is the pretense. Love does make liars out of your kind.

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for,they do not feel like fighting.

A fundamental premise of politics is we can make this work if people just never figure it out.

And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

For out of doubt In these affairs 'tis each man's will itself That gives the start, and hence throughout our limbs Incipient motions are diffused.

Intellectual prowess has its limitations. Thus, do not limit the scope of your learning to the realm of the intellect.

That's my only goal: Stay off crack.

I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember.