The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

A Spaniard and a Pole worked in the barbershop where we got our hair cut. An Italian shined our shoes. A Croat washed our car. This was America.

Rename your “To-Do” list to your “Opportunities” list. Each day is a treasure chest filled with limitless opportunities

Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.

Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self.

The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.

To anticipate the market is to gamble. To be patient and react only when the market gives the signal is to speculate.

If we're being told to do stupid or cruel things, then it is morally correct to disobey.

Man and wife were supposed to stay together because they'd made their vows in front of God and family.

You don't discipline yourself to attain the feeling of love. You attain the feeling of love and then you want to discipline yourself because you love the discipline, because it brings more love.

I began to pay attention to Scripture and meet people who walked the walk, and little by little, I guess you could call me a born again Christian. 1978 is when I found my walk with the Lord.