The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

I had a love affair with life, and as is the custom, I will lose, but will regain a greater love with my heavenly Father.

If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people

Look for the heart of a tradition in the actions of its humble servants and selfless teachers. Listen and let the teachings be borne out, or set aside, based on your experience.

The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

But the fact that most of the show you can't be prepared for, you have no idea really what's coming is initially very nerve wracking, by now, it's kind of fun.

Well, I never really practiced because I never had the opportunity to practice.

Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

When you have an unconditional love of Life, then you love Life just the way it is showing up, right here, right now. This is only possible when you are "seeing the perfection."