Our political divides have become our personal divides.

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.

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.

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.

It's amazing what flipping a grown man over her shoulder does for a girl.

Our heart always transcends us.

Yes here's to the founding fathers—slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes...

laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

It's all about where your mind's at

I thought Jeb Bush would have made a good president. He was on the board of my foundation. He's very conservative, much too conservative for me.

God has spoken to me differently through my life, and it has gotten better as I've gotten older. I don't know if that's my reception or his maturing.

Every mortal loss is an immortal gain.

Songs are a way to express what I have felt. A way to understand what happened to me or to other people.