The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

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.

The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he's a baby.

Or maybe I’d lost my soul already. I doubted God let someone like me keep any gift from him. It was highly likely I’d been born without one.

I would like to have Brooklyn christened but I'm not sure which religion yet.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

It is not designed that the road should be made too smooth for us here upon earth.

I want a part where I can use my own hair, my own voice, and maybe even be literate.

Together, we can help make sure that every family that walks into a restaurant can make an easy, healthy choice.

Scrutiny has never scared me because I have had detractors all my life.

A hyperactive stock market is the pickpocket of enterprise.

This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.