Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.

My goal is to make something special and pure, and that keeps me going, keeps me busy on the path of sobriety.

Through its appropriation of "texts of terror" and especially through the application of those texts to the Jews, the Christian religion created the conditions for the oppression of Palestinians.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

From start to finish, this movie is obviously about God. He is the main character. How is is possible that we live as though it is about us?

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.

God cast you in His play, wrote you into His story. He has a definite direction for your life. Fulfill it and enjoy fulfillment. Play the part God prepared for you and get ready for some great days.

Someone explained parallax error to me, and I thought Ah, with a cheap camera, it would be pretty easy to behead someone.

But that was the best time of my life, and only now that it has gone from me forever -- only now do I realize it.

Oh, wondrous power! how little understood, Entrusted to the mother's mind alone, To fashion genius, form the soul for good, Inspire a West, or train a Washington.