Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Nothing important comes with instructions.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.

To be doing good deeds is man's most glorious task.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball's wounds are self-inflicted.

All things have their place, knew wee how to place them.

I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is.

If Dante was writing The Divine Comedy in 2013, he might very well have set part of it in the suburbs.

I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don't treat me right - shame on you.

See the job, do the job, stay out of the misery.

If you always win, then you're probably doing something wrong.

What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out.