The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

Charity followed the pirate. To salvation or to hell, she would soon find out.

The very fact that the jaguar can become extinct while the Pekingese survives indicates to me that someone hasn't thought this thing through.

Audience participation should extend from on-stage to backstage to under the stage

For charity purposes, how do I help? A lot of prospective levers and tools have come into my life.

Government doesn't have to be the enemy, but too much government has produced a new kind of inequality in America: opportunity inequality.

Tatiana: "Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?" Alexander: "That wasn't fighting, Tatiana. That was foreplay.

The triple-double is just a stat. It's a test of your strength and stamina and playing ability, really.

I remember, especially like when I was in high school, going to see like Dawn of the Dead and it was like mayhem in the theater and you could barely even watch the movie. It was so fun.

I'm pure geek, pure logic.

Amor vincit omnia, et nos cedamus amori. Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love.