The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

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.

When your heart feels strangely warm, you’ve found your love

Sometimes we know people who aretoo wonderful for words. I am not one of them.Or you, for that matter, as you well know.

To influence others, we must know what is influencing them... and they must know that we get it.

I was in Hollis' band for eight years, playing drums. At one time we had Barry Beckett, Jimmy Johnson, David Hood - everybody but Roger Hawkins. We had a hell of a band.

Imported actors, like certain wines, sometimes do not stand the ocean trip. This can be as true of American actors in Europe as it is of European actors in America.

When the public starts classifying you as thoughtful, someone given to serious issues, you find yourself declassified as a humorist.

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

If you want to get on in this world make many promises, but don't keep them.

I am completely serious. When I decide to do something, I decide to really do it.