People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.

I think authors can get into trouble viewing the subject matter as their turf

It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Without dignity, identity is erased.

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled...and I just wanted to keep being filled.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him laughing equanimity even in hard times.

I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life

Language is the art of experience

[Merlin - on realizing the he'd killed a man with his m

As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years.

A gifted small girl has explained that pins are a great means of saving life, "by not swallowing them.

Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.

I think narcissists are endlessly watchable. The way they view the world and the way they interact within the world.

I learned that people don't buy anything from unknown stores.

Gratitude is our most direct line to God and the angels.

I believe there is a direct correlation between love and laughter.