Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.

Oh, man, ‘the nursery, ’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids, ” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.

You always have a choice. Choose to be splendid.

You have to train your brain to be positive just like you work out your body.

Once someone asked me three words that best describe me and I said 'Loud, Louder, and Loudest.'

None of us are going to have perfect lives. Our own vision of what we think is good maybe different from what He [God] thinks. And we forget that. We think we know what's best and we don't.

I think we love watching people that are flawed because we're all flawed.

American GIs don't fight this unjust immoral and illegal war of Johnson's.

I gave up my music because I had received from it all I had to receive. To serve God one must sacrifice the dearest thing, and I sacrificed my music, the dearest thing to me.

My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.

I don't know whether I will drink again in my life but I didn't drink yesterday, I am not drinking today and I'll try not to drink again tomorrow.

Kindness and politeness are not overrated at all. They're underused.