One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people's lives, with real individuals.

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

In terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone's mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

I'm not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I'm going, what time I'll be back and then I gotta sign back in.

Denominations divide while the cross unites.

A heart never breaks in the same pattern of pieces

Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".

The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

And one of the elders of the city , said , speak to us of good and evil. And he answered : You are good in countless ways , and you are not evil when you are not good .

From the midst of the very fountain of pleasure, something of bitterness arises to vex us in the flower of enjoyment.

Charity isn't about pity, it is about love.

Take your love and put it where the sun don't shine.

Any excuse to get away from the computer screen is welcome.