To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

One who cannot swim must not blame the water.

Recognizing isn't at all like seeing

No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Attitudes are every bit as important as aptitudes.

Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.

Oh yes. You’ve caught me. I confess. My sole purpose in life is to gleefully, willfully, maniacally destroy all of your precious chrome babies.

We need more than a new politics; what we need is a new worldview. We need a fundamentally different bottom line.

I'm still amazed at how much people are willing to humiliate themselves to be on TV.

But I'm also a vegetarian so there's another factor I guess.