The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

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.

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 danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.

A negative circle is the enemy of a positive future.

Try to resist copying a blueprint from another person's ministry.

Ari smiled. The sun was shining, the weather was great, he was eating ice cream, and all his dreams were about to come true.

Explain to me how he [her son] can ride a bicycle, run, play ball, set up a camp, swing, fight a war, swim and race for eight hours ... and has to be driven to the garbage can.

I think it is that parents just don't kick their kids out the door as much as they used to. I think the demise of sandlot sports has had a lot to do with it.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.

Maybe there's less oppression growing up in a small village, and fewer rules, and less danger.

In a mouse we admire God's creation and craft work. The same may be said about flies.

In science, a path that turns out to be a dead end is very useful because you don't devote resources to focusing on that; you go elsewheres.

If we've seen one thing from Donald Trump, it's that he says one thing one day, and another thing another.