One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.

...We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.'We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials.

But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.

Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?

Human relationships are binary: they are complete and fully loving when both people are authentic or they are not at all.

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.

If my people are wiped out you must destroy all photographs of us, because future generations will look at our photographs and be too ashamed at such a crime against humanity.

When I started to write culinary mysteries, I did it because nobody was doing it anymore.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.

It was always acting for me, since I was about 15. My middle brother always wanted to be a news anchor, so we always felt that he'd be the one to take over for dad, so we could go and do our thing.