The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

Focus is where you fail or succeed.

The pursuit of prosperity shouldn't stop you from the pursuit of happiness.

There is something very unique in American iconography about this notion of the pursuit of happiness.

[L]iberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted . . .

I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public.

Nature is only another chimera.

When you see yourself quoted in print and you’re sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation.

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality.