The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.” Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.

In what way did your parents screw up to make you the woman you are today?

I like peace and solitude and silence.

I don't necessarily look for dark themes; they just seem to appear.

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.

The covetous person is full of fear; and he or she who lives in fear will ever be a slave.

anyone who used the word hip probably wasn't.

We share this planet with many species. It is our responsibility to protect them, both for their sakes and our own.

In the face of uncertainty, there is nothing wrong with hope.

There is no greater gift you can give or receive than to honor your calling. It's why you were born. And how you become most truly alive.

I'm not a fan almost anywhere of announcing to the enemy of what I'm going to do.