Our rule was that we [with Kate DiCamillo] would write everything together, literally every word.

Little boy, you remind me how so much depends of day made of now

You are most powerful when you are most silent.

Your heart literally hurts when it's breaking. You can feel it, every beat another ache, and nothing you can do will stop it, either from beating or breaking.

Walk slowly; all you can ever come to is yourself.

We certainly have a lot of ideas, and we both love what Tony [Fucile] did with the book [Bink & Gollie]. If we could all pull it off, I think all three of us would like to do another.

I'm a big State Fair person, and my main goal is to eat as much food as possible, but I tend not to do the foods on a stick. But I like Big Fat Bacon.

Wouldn't want to miss a war, would I?

It's very cool to be short, very cool. When I was in eighth grade, and the height I am now, I would just look at the cute little short girls and think, 'If only, if only.

Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world's great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.

All it takes is a single moment.

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.

Don’t rush to justify yourself with a verbal argument

What you are going to do today should assume a bigger shape than what you have done yesterday.

Men have to recognize that women are not all the same when it comes to what can get them aroused.

I remember when I first walked into Mayer's cavernous office. You had to walk 50 yards to get to him, and in that time he could really study everything about you.

The Golden Age of Secularism has passed.

I had been working on a second book with [David] Petraeus called Relentless. Obviously that book and the income that it would have generated went away.

America's greatness is not found in the size of its government. America's greatness resides in the hearts and the minds of the people.

Yes, I do feel the world revolves around me. After all, I am the main character of my own life.

Laws ... proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the law-giver, but let the judge be a mere machine.