The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.

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.

Always there has been an adventure just around the corner--and the world is still full of corners.

The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.

You can always tell your true values by looking at your behavior -- especially under pressure.

The technical process which is interesting in it's own right but I think the creative process is what's more intriguing to me.

When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

When things are going wrong declare constantly that you are not going to be afraid or intimidated by any outer condition.

Anybody can leverage celebrity for profit.

Let's take a drive into the middle of nowhere with a packet of Marlboro lights and talk about our lives.

Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.